To My Darling :: Always & In Always :: Letter #2

:: The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.:: - Edward Thomas

Darling New Orleans!  

Saturday led to a fabulous adventure of wondering the shores of  Ria Lagartos and San Felipe with J!  Plenty of fishing boats but oh, the sailing would have been perfect!  J and Felipe, our host, apologized for the smell of fish and water colliding into a thick soup, a smell that says home as I associate it with the Gulf and Lake Pontchartrain.  In my excitement of realizing that I was just a short 500 miles from you, I ordered a spicy fish stew, so similar to the stew we sampled at Jazz Fest.  Served with a frosty cold beer, it was a taste of home and heaven.  YUMMY! 

Before I describe the ria area, let me share the magnificent sightings on the drive from Merida to San Felipe. This area of the Yucatan is a hilly interior filled with cattle ranches and hacienda ruins.  A gorgeous cardinal left a streak of red across the crumbling facade of a church structure in Kiki, a wonderful name for this tree lined town.  On the side of the roads, there are beautiful cemeteries filled with concrete headstones of embossed flowers and angels, painted in the brightest colors possible by the family of the dead.  The below ground inhabitants must surely dance at night in such a magnificent garden! 

After lunch we hired a fishing boat to tour the sandy edge of the ria and rounded into the Gulf.  The area is a protected biosphere reserve for nesting flamingos.  There was a little inlet in the land mass between the ria and the town of Ria Lagartos filled with twenty plus screaming pink flamingos, or as MaMere would  say they were painted Italian Ghetto Pink, secretly her favorite color for lipstick!  The water was so clear in some spots I could see dancing jelly fish performing a shadowed ballet across the surface of limestone resting 30' below the Gulf surface.  Returning to the malecon of San Felipe and its' brightly colored wooden cottages dressed with red corrugated roofs, and lined with ochre painted planters filled with palms, I stretched out on a bench, looking up at the failing blue of the sky, amazed by the cast iron lights lending a gas light glow as familiar as that found along St. Charles Avenue.

I was filled with the lovely dream of two worlds merging.

Come Home Soon!

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