Sinaloa, March? Friday? 2008 I ran away from my company, from corporate, from data and computers, sections and 43-101 reports. I wanted to log core and that is what I am doing. I’m not saying where or for whom or what the type of mineralization it is, but I am in Mexico. Every morning I am up early before the “professores” as we geos are called (I love being called a “professore”). It is really cold in the morning you can see your breath. I wear my heavy coat. The dining room is a refrigerator so I go in the kitchen. The old Mexicans in their cowboy hats and some young drillers in baseball caps sit in ancient hand-hewn chairs around an old adobe stove that has huge logs sticking out of it like a campfire and the top of it is covered by the lid of an old oil can – long gone what ever residue was on it. The smoke was never too bad. It went straight up where I notice the eaves of the roof, the beams and the clay tiles don’t come completely flush with the tops of the walls. The smoke makes its way out the room by slipping through the gaps in the ceiling. Central in the kitchen was the adobe stove. On the side of the stove was a large, flat stone that had been used for likely the 120 years this town has been here. The stone was black from smoke and had a smooth shallow dip in it from years of being milled upon – this stone was like a basin and the ladies put farina (wheat flour) on the stone and use another smaller smooth stone to crush the farina into flour to make the tortillas. This apparatus was historic and I loved to imagine the hands of the many old and young women, sisters, cousins, mothers, daughters who made flour with it. This stone mill represented continuity in the community of traditions and family heritage.
The people in the kitchen smile the moment your head peeks around the corner (the entrances are tiny both because the people are small and also to keep the draft down so some of the household passages seem a bit like an underground mine, or as I had described before, I get a sense of a cloister for pious people.) Anyway, I am always warmed in the kitchen by both the ancient stove and the welcome of these people. We call ourselves “the family”.
One day, Bill sent me fetch water from the kitchen but he didn’t want a big jug of water and he didn’t want a little bottle of water, he wanted a medium jug of water. As I was walked across the yard to the kitchen I was reviewing what I would say in Spanish because the word for medium is very similar to the word for middle-of so I prepared my sentence so as not to confuse them. When I stuck my head into the kitchen I saw the old cowboys sitting around the ancient stove with plates of food, the two camp cooks were up to their elbows in bowls making something, another was sitting at a little preparation table with his plate of food: there was my family. They all stopped what they were doing as I held my hands up to the shape of about the size of jug Bill wanted so as to augment my request, I opened my mouth and started, “I need a…” but I stopped because I realized I had worked out the word for medium but the word for jug was very similar to the word for juice so I was hesitated in the middle of the sentence with my hands in the air in a mental stupor. I was stuck. I looked at their faces and they were all suspended in time with their spoons half the way to their faces, the ladies mixing motion was frozen in time, everyone was leaning toward me in the moment like statues waiting to hear WHAT I WANTED… I burst into laughter. They immediately melted into the warm old souls of humans that I love every day. We laughed together so hard we were crying. They kept mimicking me with their hands how I came in and made the size of a jug and we were bent over laughing it felt good to let that energy flow. The boss came to see, but we could hardly explain. You had to be there.
Yesterday, the stove was removed. A cold patch of new cement marks its spot where a new, modern stove will arrive to accommodate the size of the growing camp. This morning, my family and I stood with our arms linked together at the sorry site and commented on the many ages and families the old stove served. We agreed it was a bad idea but that we like the new hot water machine and that the new stove will be more efficient and clean. I would have been disturbed by this change if they weren’t with me to share this moment.
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