As I lose all my regrets

These days I wake up wondering if I have just lived a lifetime in 24 hours, some days I have. This year has begun with endings and I would be grateful for a beginning in the near future, just in case anyone is answering prayers. My last 3 weeks in San Miguel were more painful than the time I caught typhoid there...I deal better with strange temporary diseases than saying goodbye to this temporary permanence.

How, I don´t know, did I accumulated so much in 2.5 years in Mexico? That question was asked alot when moving it. My time left, in this place others come to enjoy, was spent in labor of moving; people, boxes, lives. During this time I was able to visit my iPod with beautiful sites and beautiful people and I became attached to a song, of course, during all this shuffling of everything-and-nothing-at-once. Twilight has always been my favorite time of day, the closure and the beginning, with soft golden blues that make me shed tears when I see the sky spreading out before me. One night as I drove down the mountain at twighlight time "Set the Twighlight Reeling" by Lou Reed came on. Now I know lots of people that find their comfort in God, but nothing put me at comfort that twilight time like Lou Reed´s cracky, edgy voice...he saved me from many bad mama incidents in my last weeks. Though this video version isn´t the sound quality of my iPod and Lou singing to me, Elvis Costello is a nice consolation prize and I hope you all enjoy a musical adventure.

My gift of strength while I packed up a formerly happy life into boxes was to gather this woman of strength in me. I did dread moving but part of me looked foward to it also, to get on with this life and not live in these disjointed boxes of life alone and married life every once in awhile. Now I am finding it difficult living with another adult after all this independence. Perhaps I should say all this dependence, on only myself, to make it through the next moment, which leads to the hour, day, week. There were moments I needed a guide and there was no manual for success or failure, surely there are years of therapy involved for my children on the dreaded move from Mexico...but we all found bravery.

When you leave something you love and you know it´s this slow departure, you have time to taste the sweetness. Things you once found negligible begin to take value. Since I was driving most of my days, my delicacies come in one line on scraps of paper: cobblestone roads, a cantalope moon, the Parroquia, losing Roarke´s glove and retrieving it from the mirador, giant ficus trees at La Concepcíon, tiendas, a dusty construction worker blowing me a kiss, the all permeating dust , sweet tears, kissing lovers, twirling batman acrobats in the last circus, yellow huizache blossoms, Guadalupe (always Guadalupe) and twilight. My sweetest last moments driving on the obnoxiously bumpy roads of San Miguel de Allende. Of course always my children, with me, sharing this journey. How did I earn the blessing of these three beautiful humans that I am supposed to care for? Simultaneously I am irritated and brought to my knees in thankfulness.

So many times it was commented, *you can´t do all this by yourself*, *you have to do it this way...*, *you need help*. Advice given in love and sometimes as if to say I wasn´t capable of delivering. Times came when I accepted help and then you simply have to step up, for yourself and the people you love, and say I will do this and I can. At the end of it all; the shuffling of things, boxes in Mexico, vehicle left in Mexico, still plans to arrange...I did what had to be done. Nine hundred miles between children and their father was covered to give them a family and some security and to let go of the regrets at leaving geographical points on a map. Yes, I did set the twilight reeling.