10 Years Ago: Antigua, Guatemala: Yogurt and Bread

 

My typical food menu remains the same today as it did 10 years ago, as do my prejudices about food trends that purport to perform miracles of super-health. Fortunately, I'm a person who feels satisfied with the same foods day after day. Maybe that's because my daily food is sexy to me, so I don't lust for paramours. OK, well. There is kettle corn, a long-time lover with which I pass a little time maybe twice a year. 

I rarely have bread. Revisiting this 10-year old post on bread sends me into reveries of delicious memories. 

About that blackberry yogurt in Antigua: While in Quito this past year, I sought jugo de mora, that magical potion that I experienced in Quite decades ago, the memory of which is permanently embedded in my brain, but the closest I could get to it were packets of powdered blackberry drink, which I bought at every opportunity. They were quite good. Sadly, I abandoned my accumulated packets in Lima, Peru, under duress, a story I will likely tell sometime soon. Months later, my regret at their loss remains palpable. 

Monday, May 2, 2016

Antigua, Guatemala: Yogurt and Bread

Generally, I live on a pretty straightforward menu, which consists of some protein, bread, lots of vegetables and fruit. Strong-flavored cheese at times.

No worries, I'm not about to embark on a litany in adoration of the latest trend based on junk-science, whether it be paleo, blood-type, gluten-free-for-everyone, raw food, whole30, or whatever else the shit is out there being hawked by modern-day snake-oil sellers these days. Also, I'm not a foodie, at least not in the sense of being a gourmet.

I'm just offering a preface to get to today's topic: yogurt and bread.

Because although my dietary regimen is pretty boring by most measures, I love the food I eat. And when a particular item on my usual menu surpasses my expectations, I get a little swoony.  Don't even get me started on the wonders of the snappy, sweet, jumbo carrots you can get inside Antigua's cavernous municipal market.

Or how I practically licked the plate at an Italian restaurant in Antigua, where I lapped up the pasta in an Alfredo sauce with such enthusiasm, a dish I hadn't had in maybe a year or more, that the gentleman I was with appeared a little alarmed at just how much I enjoyed that meal. I looked him straight in the eye and smiled without shame.

But anyhoo, on to the main point of this post.

Yogurt. I don't remember if I stumbled on the yogurt at Doña Luisa's little storefront bakery adjacent to the well-known restaurant, or if someone recommended it to me, but Goddamn, that yogurt is good! I tried the blackberry (mora) yogurt first, as a bit of nostalgia from my trip to Ecuador in my youth, where the memory of whipped, frothy blackberry juice I bought there has stuck with me ever since. The texture of Doña Luisa's yogurt is thick and a little granular, so in addition to a delicious flavor, it has a luscious mouth feel.

It's more expensive than any of the other yogurt  I tried in Antigua, but exponentially richer in flavor and feel.

Bread. By pure chance, on a certain day at a certain time on a certain stretch of sidewalk near Central Park in Antigua, I bought a bag of rolls from a woman who sat on said sidewalk. I am rolling my eyes heavenward just thinking of them. Round, kind of flat, with a bit of chewiness, and just a little sweetness. 

Sadly, after I consumed all of the rolls, I couldn't find them anywhere again. Anywhere! I didn't even know what they were called. In describing the rolls to just about everyone I met, someone would offer a name for them, and I'd hie myself to the multitude of bakeries in town and ask about them. I tried a couple that were similar in looks and shape. No!

Eventually, after some goose-chasing leads, I got a couple of new name possibilities from my Spanish teacher: "pan de Patzún" or "pan de maxtate." Bingo. The reason I couldn't find this bread in any of the bakeries is because it isn't sold in any of the bakeries in Antigua (at least not that I found). It is a local bread from the countryside, let's call it a farmer's bread, perhaps considered too rustic by city folk.

With the new intel, I continued to ask around where I might find this bread. A new lead came to me, I think it was from the guy who sells bus tickets to Lake Atitlan in the cafe across from a local supermarket: "If you go over there (pointing to an area outside the supermarket) on Tuesday afternoons at about 3:00, no, maybe 4:00, you'll find a woman who sells this bread." I learned from this gentleman, or perhaps another informant, that the bread is normally sold inside the massive Antiguan municipal market, brought in from the countryside only on the big market days.

Guatemalan bread: Pan de maxtate or pan de Patzún. Antigua, Guatemala. April 2016.

I couldn't find this woman on the designated afternoon, so to the municipal market I went. I asked this vendor, and that vendor, and the other vendor. "Pan de maxtate? Pan de Patzún?" No, no, no. Then someone pointed deeper into the darkness of the market, "Back there." I kept asking. Finally, a woman indicated she knew where I could find this bread, and she led me there. Aha! A woman had baskets of it! The holy grail!

I bought a huge bag of the rolls to hopefully last me the duration of my visit. And it did.

Guatemalan bread: Pan de maxtate or pan de Patzún. Antigua, Guatemala. April 2016.

Guatemalan bread: Pan de maxtate or pan de Patzún. Antigua, Guatemala. April 2016.

Sigh. Mission complete.

5 Years Ago: A Thought Experiment: Full-Time Tenting

Five years ago, I contemplated a life as a full-time tenter. 

There's no downside to envisioning different futures in one's head. 

I decided not to hike down that particular trail, and in fact, I don't even have a tent at the moment, and I have a different car. My new-to-me-car is a Prius, and there are plenty of folks who trick theirs out for camping, but a Prius isn't as camper-friendly to me as my 2012 Prius V was. I'm currently playing around in my head with what kind of camping I want to do in future. 

I spent the major part of the previous two years on a Pan-American road trip, either by car or by bus. 

The most tedious part of long-term travel is the route-planning. Living as a full-time tenter means constant route-planning: Where am I going? How am I going to get there? Where will I stay on the way? How long will it take me (in actual time, not Google directions time) to get from each day's start time to my desired arrival time? Where will I stay when I get there? What necessary services are along the way, such as groceries and gas? Are there vacancies at my desired destinations or waystations? Are there floods or fires that have closed roads or that might close roads (both were a factor in fall 2024 as I headed to the west coast and northward)? Bus trips through Latin America are no different: Which bus goes to my desired destination? None? Ok, so let's figure out which zigzagging bus trips I need to take to eventually get to my desired destination. 

Yes. The thought experiment on being a full-time tenter was a good one. It helped me make a decision: That will be a road not taken. 

Monday, May 3, 2021

Rootless and Portable: A Thought Experiment: Fulltimer Tenting

 

My Oliver Lee State Park campsite, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico. September 2012.

I've flirted with the idea of becoming a full-timer for more than 10 years, always in a modest arrangement. A smallish camper or, more recently, ChezP.

In the past five years, I've gone on innumerable video tours of folks living out of their cars. I've imagined how I might make it work for me at some future point. Over time, I concluded that full-timing out of my car was not a good fit for me. Too cramped.

But in the past year, I toyed with the possibility of full-timing in a tent (with ChezP as my back-up when inclement weather dictates). 

A tent is roomier. Living in a tent also frees up one's vehicle for transportation.  

What's out there to inform full-time tentfolk on the practicalities?

The resources I seek address my specific vision of tenting full time for up to a year: 

• Relocation every three to four weeks for new scenery, geographic interests, special events, or proximity to an expensive tourist destination
• Although wifi welcome, I don't envision tenting full time as a digital nomad who requires daily, robust internet access, as this would seriously restrict my freedom of movement
  
• Mild climate is a requisite
• I don't want to tent for three or more weeks in places where fear of bears (or mountain lions!) are going to keep me awake, like here (oh my!)
  

Below are some sources that give me actionable intel on:

• Practical realities of living full-time in a tent (power, water, location, weather, food, etc.)
• Gear (tents, kitchens, power, furniture)
  
• How to stay warm or cool; how to stay dry
• How to mitigate invasions from water, insects and other small critters, and wind

 Living in a Tent Full Time? - TMWE S4E22

 

On Wikihow: How to Live in a Tent (With Pictures). There are useful relevant how-to articles on the page, as well, along with references. Simple, clear, very practical. 

From One Crazy House: 15 Tent Hacks to Make Your Tent the Comfiest Place on Earth. (Note: Manage your expectations, of course, but there are some good hacks here that were new to me.)

From Mossy Oak: Camping in the Rain: 7 Tips for Keeping Your Tent Dry

 

Source: ScoutmasterCG

 

 

2026 Word of the Year: Light: Out of Trauma

 

Light, El Rosario Church, San Salvador, El Salvador. August 2025. Photo credit: Mzuriana.

In Spanish, "to give birth" is expressed by "dar luz" - to give light. So beautiful. 

Recently, I listened to an NPR podcast: Hurricane Katrina Had a Silver-Lining for Some: Post-Traumatic Growth. 

Yeah, yeah, there are all of the cliches, such as "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger," and alas, that unfortunate decision to reference another in the podcast title: "every cloud has a silver lining." (There is truth to these and other cliches, but there is no silver lining for all traumas. "Growth" is quite different from silver linings.)

Thus far, I've experienced three discrete, negative, life-changing events. The first pushed me into deep financial poverty, but I knew - I knew - that this would eventually pass. Furthermore, it was an unavoidable consequence of a responsible decision to exit an untenable situation for me and my very young child. The second event was a heartbreak that felt bottomless in its depths, and which prompted a radical new turn on my life's road.

As profound as these events were, neither was what I would call trauma. And did I experience growth following these two events? Absolutely. With time. And with support of others. 

Note: What I call trauma or not-trauma is only for myself. I do not presume to define trauma for anyone else's lived experiences. Furthermore, trauma is not a comparison game; it's not a perverse competition. 

But the third event - not an event, really, a situation, a process, still ongoing - has been trauma. The nature of this trauma is that I do not have the power to make it stop. I do not have the control to undo the damage already done. I don't even know how widely the harm has been disseminated. 

This post, however, is not about the trauma itself. 

It is how the podcast I listened to hit me in a fresh way that told me I can expel the unhelpful brain loops of trauma and create new pathways - dar luz - toward liberation.

(But I'm ready for my epidural, please!)

5 Years Ago: Rootless: The Last Monday Letter

 

Five years later, there's nothing more I can add to this. I think of my mom often. 

Monday, March 29, 2021

Rootless: The Last Monday Letter

 

Carol Cottage, Missouri. January 2011.

Dear Mom, 

I've written you a letter almost every Monday since mid-December 2018. 

In that first weekly letter, I was at the end of an interregnum Missouri visit, about to depart for a Christmas-New Year layover in South Louisiana before heading westward to my next tourist-in-residency --> Tucson.  

When I wrote you that letter, I still had my 1995 Toyota Camry. When I wrote you that letter, I didn't know that, two weeks later, I would say good-bye forever to that sturdy stalwart of my rootless life.

It looks like this will be my last Monday letter to you, and I'm putting it here, seeing as how you don't live at Carol Cottage anymore, seeing as how you've died, of course. You, too, were a sturdy stalwart in my life. I think you'd chuckle at being compared to a car. Or you'd be annoyed. 

Carol Cottage, Missouri. January 2011.

So let me tell you about your funeral and burial.  It was everything you'd asked for.

You lay in your casket in a long-sleeved, white cotton nightgown. White-thread embroidery just below the neckline, a band of hand-stitched eyelets below the neckline, a pleated bodice. Pretty details, yet still in the range one can call simple. Exactly your style.

The James Lee Burke book, Pegasus Descending, featuring our mutual hero, Dave Robicheaux, rested on your belly, propped against the open half-lid of the casket. You had a perverse fondness for Dave's violent, psychopathic side-kick, Clete Purvis. 

As you'd asked, we ordered your casket from an online supplier and had it shipped to the funeral home to side-step the markup costs assessed by funeral homes for their caskets. We selected a poplar casket in a cherry finish that, like your nightgown, had pleasing details of interest, but overall, evoked the comfortable warmth and intimacy of your living room. And, gosh, did you know you can buy a casket at Costco? We chose yours from a different company, but knowing Costco's got caskets is something to tuck away for future reference.

As for how you looked in the casket, you didn't just "look good" like in the cliche about such things. You were beautiful. Astonishingly so. I'm serious, Mom. Even your nails were manicured and polished (with the barest of pink blush), just as you would like. And you wore the exact right shade of lipstick for your complexion. I'm not saying you looked beautiful "for your age," a woman of 91. No, you were beautiful in that casket irrespective of age. 

You wanted Ave Maria sung at your funeral. The soloist, a young woman, sang it to you, to us, in a clear, warm, mezzo-soprano voice, from the balcony behind us. The notes of that transcendent song washed over me.

Your Ave Maria was gorgeous. But when the young singer began to serenade you with Amazing Grace while your descendants escorted you from the altar to the waiting funeral car, well, that took my breath away.   

 

 

The car procession that followed you to the cemetery ... an unremarkable journey. 

No Fellini-esque plot twists on the way, as happened after your brother, Clement's, funeral. Remember? When dozens of us, including you and Dad, idled outside the church, seemingly forever, waiting for the priest to lead the vehicular cavalry? And when you asked the funeral director what was taking so long for us to get started, he conjectured that maybe the priest was eating a sandwich. 

We eventually did get going, one car following another, as they do in a funeral procession. We seemed to drive a long time, first on a congested arterial road, then on the highway, then off the highway onto another arterial road and then, oddly, the funeral car took a right turn onto a small side street. A dead-end, in fact. We followed, of course, only to understand that the funeral car driver had taken a wrong turn somewhere and he'd only entered this street so he could turn around (turn all of us around) and get onto the right path. Remember how we all poked our vehicles' noses into residents' driveways so we could then back up and restore our places in line behind the retreating funeral car?

There had been so much idling in front of the church before getting underway that your youngest child had to pull out of the funeral procession so he could gas up his truck before he ran out of fuel.

Oh, what a dramatic third act that was!

But getting back to your memorial day. It had rained earlier, but the rain abated for the final stop of our long good-bye to you. Chilly, though. If you'd been among us en vivo, at the cemetery, under the final-words canopy, you'd have been rolling your eyes and sighing while the priest used his bully pulpit to convince us of how fun it is to be in heaven. Me, I just shivered in the cold and waited impatiently for him to cut the commercial and get back to the program: you. 

Daughter Kit had a mission to visit Dad's grave (where you were about to join him) and her paternal grandfather's grave. She'd already obtained their grave 'addresses' and their locations on the cemetery map, and following your closing ceremony under the canopy, she and her family and I drove to Dad's cemetery neighborhood. 

So it was that we came upon the newly dug grave, into which you would be interred. We watched while the cemetery crew brought you to the grave in, let's call it a carriage, albeit a humble, utilitarian one. We watched how the crew pulled your casket from the carriage, centered you into a harness of sorts, and carefully lowered you into your grave with straps and winches, guiding your slow descent by hand. 

You would have been quite interested in watching this process. 

It felt good to be with you in your most final of final moments.

OK, then. This is my last Monday letter, Mom.

Love, 

Mzuri

 

Related posts

• Love Note For a Waning Moon
• Travels with Carol
• We Stop for Carcasses

 

Post office and cows, Topawa, Tohono O'odham Nation, Arizona. July 2019.

 

Word of the Year 2026: Light: Let in the Light, v.2

Light enters kitchen window in Mobile, Alabama. June 2022. Photo credit: Mzuri

I re-run my 2021 light-therapy post. Today I'm in a different year, a different state, in another small place, that alas, is miserly in its bestowal of light. 

Nevertheless, my morning welcoming-in of the light persists, although the stinginess of the light here demands the addition of artificial light, using daylight LED bulbs. 

As I write this, I smile, remembering the bleak hotel room in Lalibela, Ethiopia, in which I proclaimed to the hotel clerk during the first of two meltdowns in that city, when he flipped on the room light with no measurable effect: "This is the room you give to someone who no longer has the will to live!" (The Karen designation had not yet been birthed, but, oh yes, Karen was my name in Lalibela.)

As I write this, we live in a time of appalling acts of violence against the bodies, minds, and civil rights   - with impunity - against our fellow beings, be they women, men, or children - over which I have so little control, and which can push me into my soul's murkier corners ... But I do have the power to open window blinds, I can turn on lights, and I can pull my eyes away from a device and look out a window. 

I do have that power. 

Friday, October 1, 2021

Word of the Year: Joy 10: Let in Light

 

 

Leaf in light. UTEP campus, El Paso, Texas. March 2017.

 

A morning ritual sends a small joy to my soul.

I open the wide slats of my white window blinds, push the blinds up to the window tops, and let in the light of the day. 

My morning ritual also connects me to my mother's morning ritual. She had white, wood window shutters, which she, too, opened each morning, in her bedroom, in her living room, in her dining room, in her tiny kitchen. This daily connection with her pleases me.

Light through Carol's living room windows. January 2011.

Feel the light

Morning light through kitchen window. Ferguson, Missouri. March 2018.

Morning light in my Rustavi, Georgia (Caucasus) window. July 2011.

Light through my living room window in Opelousas, Louisiana. March 2015.

Light through my El Paso kitchen window. October 2016.

Light through my living room windows in Ferguson, Missouri. April 2018.

Light through the dining room window in my rooted house. Featuring Princess. May 2007.

 

Joys so far this year

Joy 1: Word of the Year: Joy

Joy 2: Music

Joy 3: Surprise Vista

Joy 4: Happy, Joyous, and Free

Joy 5: The Science of Joy, Interrupted

Joy 6: Color

Joy 7: Birdsong

Joy 8: Here and Now, Boys

Joy 9: A Tomato and Onion Sandwich

 

 

Word of the Year 2026: Light: She Kept the Light on For Me

 

Assortment of Light 1, Maison Bergogne, Narrowsburg, New York. Photo credit: Mzuri

I'm saying "she" kept the light on, but it could be a "he" just as well. I'm saying "for me," but it was "for all." 

I'm a member of a 12-step fellowship. In pre-COVID times, in my annual migrations, one of my first settling-in actions at a new tourist-in-residency was to find my fellowship's local meetings. 

During my tenure in Alamogordo, there was only one meeting.  When I attended it the first time, I found one person there, waiting. 

She came every week. Brought meeting materials. Brought program literature. Unlocked the small conference room. Turned on the light. Straightened the chairs around the table, if needed. 

She turned on that light every week, knowing that she might be the only person there, as this was the reality more often than not.

In the 12-step fellowships, healing balances on a three-legged stool: the physical, the mental/emotional, and the spiritual. 

I had the physical abstinence, and it turned out that she had not yet been able to sustain that. 

But she was light years ahead of me in the other two legs: emotional and spiritual maturity. 

Turning the light on for anyone who might stumble in from the dark, week after week - that is a woman whose inner light shines. 

2026 Word of the Year: Light

British Park. Mobile, Alabama. Christmas 2021. Credit: Mzuriana.

Light.

In these dark times, I need light. Maybe you do, too. 

For the joy, the promise, the inspiration that light brings, I revisit the song, This Little Light of Mine. 

My favorite is this by the Soweto Choir: 

New to me this year is from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, in a 1960 performance: 

May I find light in each day.