Potluck

I’m at a neighborhood potluck in February, the sun beating on my bare head and a stiff breeze blowing in off the Sea of Cortez behind me, with a plate of chili rellenos in front of me, made American-style with massive quantities of dyed-yellow cow cheese that will insure sinus misery for days. In La Ponderosa, the Baja campo where we spend a few weeks every winter, we are surrounded by oldsters, retirees who find us middle-agers so fascinating in our relentless activity they train telescopes and binoculars on us several times daily. They can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t welcome the normal beefy, porky potluck fare but they know we’re picky eaters; someone always prepares a cheesy dish to make sure my brother and sister-in-law, my husband and myself have something to ladle onto our plates besides the customary green salad we always contribute.

It’s their way of showing us they like us, that we’re welcome, oddballs though we are, in this microcosm of mostly-California natives who have adopted Mexican soil as home for their golden years. They seem to regard us almost like struggling shirt-tail relatives; they’ve watched us spend ten years remodeling a garage into a home on our leased lot, one stage at a time as our budgets allowed, inching away from the confinement of trailer life with no guarantee of ever reaching a state of completion. They find us endearing in a back-country sort of way.

We’re lucky to be here in the sun, lucky to ditch the worst of Idaho’s winter each season, lucky to experience Mexico’s culture first-hand. Our friends at home scrape the ice off their windshields, brave blizzards driving to work, commute home each dark evening to split another day’s firewood before bed. “You’re so lucky,” they tell us. “Wish I could pull that off.”

They don’t know the scope of our luck or the choices our habitual pilgrimage require of us. They might not be willing to embrace the recklessness of forgoing a “regular job,” depending on seven-day work weeks, ingenuity and faith to keep cash flowing the other nine or ten months of the year. They could very well balk at sacrificing health insurance, IRAs, paid vacations and sick days. They probably wouldn’t much care for the idea of doing without mini-getaways three or four times a year. Would they choose driving 12- and 15-year-old vehicles, mending clothing, cooking everything from scratch or cutting their own hair? On our extremely modest income, we manage to “vacation” in a warm climate each year for a few weeks through a series of trade-offs commonly called luck.

And when it comes right down to it, I won’t dispute the call. We are lucky. While I’d attach a different set of parameters around the notion, I celebrate luck every day of the year, whether I’m in Idaho or Mexico, whether I’m working compost I hauled from my sister’s horse corral into the garden bed or whether I’m dealing with an enormous “TO DO - TO GO” list in December that includes everything from how shall we handle mail this year? to health certificates for the dogs to move houseplants to Janet’s.

If it’s luck that determines the lay of our lives I’m grateful to have been raised by parents who believed anything is possible: that a person can carve a dream out of the wild woods through pure resolve, that pursuing the same profession all your working life could get a tad boring, that the world is full of adventure—ours for the taking, if only we dare. Besides that possibility thing, they indoctrinated us with the concept that beauty is all around us, wherever we are, and that happiness is a decision each of us makes, every minute of every day. One of my father’s favorite sayings was, “There’s nothing I’d rather be doing than what I’m doing right now.” He said it with a smile when he had his old Datsun pickup engine in a million pieces on the shop floor and grease dripping off both elbows. He said it, laughing, as he dug post holes to set new deer fence around the garden. And he said it when he curled up beside the fire with a book on a cold winter’s night.

My parents experienced abundance in spite of slim financial resources. They raised eight children on a farm that netted about $2,000 a year, along with all the meat, milk and eggs we could eat and fresh beans, corn and cabbages from the garden. My mother taught me to cook, sew, and change diapers. As a teenager I babysat neighbor kids, picked fruit and weeded sugar beets for school clothes, bought and stocked my “hope” chest with proceeds from selling my 4-H animals. My siblings and I mastered the art of making a little go a long way, allowing our dreams to guide us, sometimes jumping feet first and screaming into the unknown. For this, and more, I am blessed as well as lucky.

A few years ago my parents undertook the journey from Idaho to Mexico to visit their far-flung children, to check out the call of the sand and sea, to camp in one of our dusty old trailers and spend evenings around an outdoor fire, the stunning clear skies above us studded with constellations skewed into a southern flavor they’d never experienced. They were lucky, they told us, to have adventurous progeny, the only way they figured they would ever have ended up so far south, appreciating the relaxed and family-oriented culture in Baja. They were lucky to have managed the seventeen-hundred-mile trip unscathed in their old Datsun pickup. And since Dad didn’t bring that many tools along, they felt lucky the engine didn’t need rebuilding along the way.

As I fork chili rellenos into my mouth on the beach in Baja, surrounded by kindly Californians, I give thanks for the choices and decisions that landed me in this place and time. I say “thank you,” to my hostess, “thank you” to the proud creator of this delicious, cheesy, “Mexican” dish, and “thank you” to my lucky stars, because there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than what I’m doing right now.

Ann Clizer lives in the backwoods of North Idaho, where she is at work on her memoir, titled “On Higher Ground.”

~Ann Clizer