by Dr. David, Editor / Publisher

"Now that the holidays have come, We can relax and watch the sun..."
- Neil Young

"March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb," is what is observed in southern New England regarding the change of season, the end of winter. Here in San Miguel the same could be said regarding the change of season, March's beginning and end, except that here our change of season is not so much climatic as from high season to low.

This year, my eighth in town, the change was dramatic. I suppose that is because the high season was our highest season ever. Now riding my bicycle downhill from Colonia Allende, down Cinco de Mayo and then over to and down Guadiana, effortlessly and rapidly gliding by Parque Guadiana, what a pleasure it is to continue out onto an almost empty Ancha San Antonio, compared with the traffic snarled there continually for the first three months of the year.

For me it is like going back in time. The quiet makes me imagine this town as it must have been in decades past. The wind and dust swirling along the streets adds to the time travel affect. At a party recently, I was sitting next to a woman who, as a teenager, came to live here 40 years ago with her mother. When I waxed nostalgic about yesteryear she assented, but tempered my romantacism, asserting, "But it's nice to have contact with the outside world now, phones and internet."

In a couple of weeks I'm off to visit my daughter in New Orleans. There, at this season, leaving your air conditioned abode, the humidity hits you like a wall. Here, in May, leaving the confines of our thick-built homes, the dryness does the same; the rising heat of April having already sucked the last drops of moisture out of everything. So, our change of seasons, like New England, is also climatic. After the relative cool of our winter, and before the manna of summer's rain, May and June is a great dry exhalation.

I imagine our change of season is the same as what island summer communities experience. Here all the renters leave at the end of March. Home-owners, who only reside seasonally, most all leave in April. (There it's August and September.) After that, it's back to basics, for a few months here at least, until the rains come and it gets really hot in Texas and the schools get out in Mexico.

Here, among the remainder, there is a certain esprit de corps. These are the faces you know (even if you don't know the names that go along with them). This is the tribe, the herd, to which in some very primitive, prehuman way, it is a comfort to belong.

The city and the Centro is once again ours. Let us delight in it, in all its dusty glory.

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photo: Alessandro Bo (cropped)

Dr David has invested years of his life and more money than he cares to reckon into his global Lokkal project, an event calendar and searchable directory/business network for towns and cities around the world, combining aspects of Facebook, Google and Trip Advisor. Think: Digital Town Square. Think: the yellow pages for the new millenium. See more. A madman crying in the wilderness for years, reinforcements are recently arriving, the A team is assembling and preparations to launch in other cities are being made, gracias a dios. Interested?

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