The lost is found (and a preview of coming attractions)

Last winter, my supposed-to-last-me-the-rest-of-my-life one-terabyte external hard drive met a Sad Fate when it made sudden contact with the very hard tile floor of a Mexican beach house. Electronics do not do well with such treatment. Most of the files were backed up in other places, but not so, all the more recent photos. Sigh.

However, some of the photo files had indeed managed to sneak themselves into the hard drive of my laptop, where they were discovered when I opened a nondescript file. Photos from the January visit to the Roger Orellana Botanical Garden were hiding in (almost) plain sight. The gardens are not as breathtakingly beautiful as the Toledo Botanical Garden (or at least not in the January dry season), but they are one of the greenest places I have found in Merida.

With my departure for the tropics imminent, I am beyond excited, having been offered the opportunity to learn about the gardens and lead tours for English speakers. Education about tropical plants--for free? What self-respecting plant nerd would not sign up?

Part of the CICY research institute, the collections include a conservatory of desert plants from around the world,

a section including every Yucatecan palm species,

and of course numerous specimens of the agave that made 19th-century Merida one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Language lessons are included, since the informational signage includes not only the plant's scientific name but its common name in both Spanish and Maya.

Particularly interesting to me, however, are the medicinal and bee gardens. In the medicinal garden, plants are grouped and labeled by their uses in traditional medicine.

Part of the institute's work involves consulting with village shamans and attempting to isolate the compounds in particular plants that cure the conditions for which they are used. I am selfishly hoping to be present when some of the shamans visit the city, though I know approximately two words of Maya, the name of a bird and the name of the leaf that makes a favorite beverage. The shaman who blesses the bees makes interesting offerings: in addition to pottery and flowers, he gifts the cavity-nesting mellipona with tobacco and tequila.

This promises to be an interesting winter.

On this the darkest night

I have noticed over the years that late December seems to bring posts about loss, and this one is no exception. Since June, five women in my circle of friends and acquaintances have lost their spouses to death, two suddenly, and several people lost parents. This morning I attended the funeral of a dear former colleague's mother, a woman who, I was shocked to realize, was a year and a half younger than my late first husband, whom I cannot imagine as a man in his eighties. The greatest shock, however, was the unexpected death of a friend made more than forty years ago, when we were university students. Charles was the most gifted of our cohort, his work exhibited in a solo art show the summer after graduation, an event that proved the highlight of his life. The ensuing decades were not generally kind.

The winter solstice of course calls us to consider darkness, both as literal fact and as metaphor. We often leave for and return from work in the dark. There are fewer hours in which to accomplish the outdoor tasks that managed not to get done in the months when we wanted to do them. These short days find many of us less inclined to venture out in the evenings, the dark being so dark. We spend more time at home. Many of us turn inward, away from the outer world, at least for a while.

Similar things are happening in the non-human world. While a lot of life is still pretty lively, given the action at what I foolishly call the bird feeders, many things have gone underground: roots, seeds, larvae, hibernating animals. Humans are not the only beings who retreat from the cold and dark.

Still, even though the coldest months are ahead of us, tomorrow the days will slowly--so slowly--begin to lengthen. And today, on a hydrangea noticed on my way to a solstice observance at a site where the ancient Hopewell observed the same phenomenon, there were green buds.