Home at last! Home at last! Lord have mercy, home at last!

So that trip to Dallas was a lot more whirlwind and exhausting than we were prepared for, but it went well and now we are home again. We got to sleep in our own bed, with our own puppies.

I pretty much finished my second bear, although I am wanting to add a collar or something. But I think I should let it go and send it off. I can refine as I go, but everything doesn’t have to be on these first bears!

Alas, I appear to have lost my favorite crochet hook somewhere between the plane and the car. I was crocheting right up until landing, so I know I had it then, and when I got home, I wasn’t able to find it anywhere. I’m going to have to replace it today. I’ve got another hook that works (and two that I thought would, but don’t!) but I don’t like it as well and so I need to get one. The sad thing is that I had recently bought two new ones at the Joann’s in Colma, but I either left them at the office, or I lost them both as well. So sad!

The pups are coming to check on me now to find out when breakfast might be forthcoming.

The are both so beautiful! Whe we were on our trip, we begged Marla to bring by her Chihuahua so we could meet and greet, because we were so missing our puppies. Her dog Goldie was very sweet, with a Chihuahua face and an underbite, prob’ly around twelve pounds or so. But, honestly, she wasn’t that into us. I mean, it makes sense. We are not her people.

Marla told us the sweetest story about when they met. Marla was walking and this little dog came out and greeted her and wanted to walk with her, and she was trying to shoo her away. And then a big menacing dog came out and went after the little dog, and Marla chased it off, and after that the little dog never left her side. It was a hard sell to her husband, because they have twins who were then five, and they had promised them they could have a dog when they were seven. But it all worked out and they are crazy happy. Her husband is a really established artist, Will Power, and their twins, now ten, are Sofia and Omar Sol.

Oh, she also told us this great story about her kids. Kind of a crazy day, and they were all making dinner. And then she thanked them for helping with dinner, and they told her “we didn’t ‘help.’ We all made dinner together.”

(I should ask Marla what they made for dinner that night, so I can tell the story right.)

We didn’t actually get to meet Omar Sol and Sofia, although they were at our presentation at the community center on Wednesday night. They had homework and school the next morning, so their dad took them away before it ended. And apparently, Omar Sol was very upset. He has a lot of dietary restrictions, and he was watching us make the cauliflower ceviche and asked if he would be able to eat him, and his parents told him yes. “Then why are we leaving?!?”

Oh, at the potluck on Thursday evening, we had invited people to share their food stories. (In Spanish, which is why I should have really been taking notes, because I don’t remember Spanish conversations in enough detail), and one woman said that when she was in Mexico, her father used to grow corn. And there were nine kids, I think she said. And they ate tortillas. and that was the whole of their diet, corn tortillas from her family’s corn. And I think it was a lesson about how not all stories of “the foods we grew up with” are about abundance and plentitude. But now I am wondering if it was also a lesson that, their mother was able to sustain them on the tortillas and their labor.

At the garden planting on Thursday afternoon, we were at the Bachman Lake Together community center. Some of the women had such incredible knowledge about plants and food. Quelites and verdolagas, sí, but also a wealth of different chiles, different, squashes. I was asking how folks prepared chilacayotes and most answered dulces (candied) but one also talked about how the flowers from the chilacayote are the best eating—and they really are! Very meaty and more substantial than other squash blossoms. And I said that Luz had made them in tamales and one woman replied that she hadn’t made tamales but she especially liked them in quesadillas.

Luz is going to be working hard today to get their spring quarter classes up and running for Monday. It’s the first time they’ve taught three courses in quite a while, and it’s a big adjustment. Next winter/spring, they will be on sabbatical (at 3/4 pay), so on the bright side, it’s just spring quarter and fall quarter and then nine months off!

One lady at the dinner was saying how when she was growing up, her family ate such a wide diversity of foods, quelites, verdolagas, huazontles, amaranths, such a variety of vegetables, and then when she married her husband only wanted her to cook pork or beef. Everything she knew how to make, everything that was rich with vegetables, he dismissed. She knew so much about foods!

At the garden, too, there were three women who just knew so much about all the foods. There was none that we knew that they didn’t! I kept telling them, they need to write a cookbook, because they have the knowledge, right now! in all it’s vitality! The same knowledge that Luz and I are stumbling in the dark trying to reconstruct.

We spent quite some time with the mother of one of the women who runs the program. She was from Querétaro and was telling us about things like pan relleno de chilacayte, severd with a syrup. And lots of atoles, I think.