Semana Santa in Yelapa

It's Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week here. It's also the start of our last week in Yelapa this year. I say "this year" because our hope, our intention, is always to return next year. God willing. If we should live so long.

I'm sitting at my laptop on the front balcony of Casa Emilio at the start of another beautiful day here. I'm surrounded by jungle. Below, mostly obscured by the trees, is the central village, and beyond, across Yelapa's cove, is the main beach. There's a spinytail iguana -- the locals call them garobos -- in a tree in front of me. We have a resident population of these black lizards, some of which, the males, I think, sport streaks of scarlet on their bodies. They live under our roof tiles, come down the steep little stairway from the flat rooftop above our guest room (where we sunbathe, hang our wash to dry) to waddle past me at my computer, cross the balcony, slip between the wooden bars of the railing, and crawl out into the sun on our landlord's tiled roof to warm their cold reptilian blood before hopping into a tree to eat some leaves.  They grow quite tame as they get used to us each year, often stopping within a foot or so of your foot to look up and cock their heads as if waiting for you to say something. I often do say something, like "How you doin', buddy?" or "Aren't you looking ugly today?"

Actually, they're kind of cute, and lately they've been chasing each other around in a reptilian mating dance.

We have other visitors on occasion. One night I was awakened by what sounded like crockery being moved around on the front balcony outside our bedroom. Got up, shined my light through the bars of our open window, heard a scurrying. Cranked open the door to the balcony and pointed my light across the balcony to see the back end of a raccoon and the face of another, its eyes reflecting my light back to me from between the bars of the railing. I had to charge out at it to get it to scramble across the roof tiles and jump into a tree.

Then just yesterday my wife April, while sweeping our bedroom floor, pulled our empty luggage bags away from the wall, where they'd been stored since January, and there was the curled-up length of a snake. She yelled. Norma, our landlady, at her lavadero just below us, came up, grabbed our broom and clapped it down on the snake as it tried to crawl away. I came down from our front balcony, Norma handed me the broom, and I managed to sweep the snake outside of the bedroom, onto our back (kitchen) balcony, and down the stone steps of our entrance.

This was the second snake we've had to eject from our house, the first found in our bathroom about three weeks ago. That one I prodded from where it was curled behind the toilet into the shower stall, where it escaped through one of the two holes in the concrete wall where the water pipes come through. Both were long and skinny, dark and speckled. We have a field guide to the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals of western Mexico, but I'm not sure it shows the kind of snake we've seen. Norma calls them house snakes, which tells us something. In any case, they're harmless, she says, and they're probably good for ridding the house of other creepy-crawlies.

Oops! My wife says I must stop now. She wants us to go down to the village for the Palm Sunday procession. The church bell has been tolling.

P.S. We missed it. Took too long writing this post. Next year!