Feria Maestros del Arte

Every November, Chapala hosts the Feria Maestros del Arte, a Mexican craft show and sale, now in its tenth year. Artisans from all over Mexico come to Chapala to display their crafts.  they stay for free with local families, and thy get to keep all the money from the sales.  Above is a collection of the famous Mexican Katrinas from Michoacan.  This year we bought a few Christmas gifts.  We visit the Ojeda knife display, from Sayula, every year and buy a knife.  This year we added a beautiful cleaver to our knife collection.  Here are some photos which capture a sample of the colorful items for sale:

   




















The show also had some entertainment.  Below some young Mexican girls prepared for a performance of Ballet Folklorico:

And our friends from Maine, Ron and Jean, hosted a potter family from Tonala in Guadalajara.  They pose here for a photo with their family:

The other big news, for me, this month is the release of my new collection of poetry, Migration.  

The book is titled after the title poem which captures the spiritual experience on visiting the Monarch butterfly reserve near Zitacuaro, Michoacan in 2010.  It includes 57 poems written in the past two years.  About one third of the poems are about Mexico and another third are autobiographical.  Four of my poet friends and I, calling ourselves the "Not-Yet-Dead Poets' Society" are planning a reading in December, and poet Mel Goldberg and I are planning a book-signing event in January.  


The new book, along with my previous two collections, Sacred Lake and Agave Blood are now available online from Amazon as Kindle Books.  


Long-time readers of this blog may remember our marvelous house sitters, Mike and Christi who watched our house and Chuy for five weeks in the summer of 2010.  We, they are living here for the winter and joined us yesterday at our Thanksgiving celebration with our UU Fellowship. Here they are at the dinner table, along with a photo of Lew Crippen, our host and chief cook: 

And now, for the REALLY BIG NEWS: Pixie and I have made the decision to change our status here and become snowbirds.  In March, we will, once again, shed many of our belongings and relocate back to Maine, for most of the year, coming to Mexico only in the winter.  It is not an easy decision, but it seems like the correct one for us.  The primary factors in our decision have been family considerations and health care.  We want to be nearer to our children.  Our girls, Wendy and Cassie, live in Maine, and our son, Eric, and his family, including our grand daughter, Isabelle, are in Indiana.  We should be able to see all of them more often living in Maine.  And we both want to have our health care centered in Maine so we can use Medicare as we turn 65.  We are happy to be preserving our connection to Mexico, albiet part time.  We hope to stay in touch with our Mexican roots.  We do not regret the almost five years we will have spent here as full time residents, but, for us, this is the right decision.  I will keep the blog going until we return to Maine. Then I will end this blog and, perhaps, start a new one to coincide with this new chapter in our lives.