Almost Home

It’s amazing how fast 43 years can go and mind boggling that you can be away for so long and pick up with old friends whom you’ve only seen sporadically over the years as if you’d had lunch last week . It had taken me that long to go back to this part of Northern Mexico where our ranch was.   I’m pretty good at coming to terms with painful situations and unavoidable decisions and moving on but I’ve never gotten over losing the ranch.

I wrote in my first book, Food from my Heart,   that I had never loved anything as much as our ranch San Pedro de Ojitos and, though other places have meant just as much to me,  there is still that empty feeling somewhat akin to losing your first love and vowed never to come back and keep my memories intact .  But my godmother Virginia Wallace is 94 years old, doesn’t travel much and  I wanted to see her.  Each year since I can remember I always have gotten a call on my birthday and I felt  that the perfect way  to celebrate this “big” birthday  would with her and my childhood friends, Elisa and Carmela who threw the wonderful garden party for me in her adobe home built long ago and beautifully restored in the style of the ranch she grew up in, Corralitos.

There is a long  history between our two families.  My godmother’s mother was my uncle Lalo’s godmother; my mother and godmother were life-long friends and both went to and graduated (my mother as valedictorian and godmother as salutatorian)  from Loretto Academy in El Paso as did Carmela and me but without the honors.  I did make the top 10% of the class!  My mother helped save Elisa’s life when she drank some petroleum as a baby.  I, along with all the girls in my age group, had a crush on Bilo who still looks great.  These generational friendships are very traditional in Mexico and the parents  are called “tio” and “tia” and the  kids consider themselves “primos de carino” cousins by affection.

More importantly we have shared histories.  Most of us (me excepted) were born in the United States and despite te Wallace and Jeffers last names consider ourselves Mexican and live  a Mexican way of life.  In the mid 1800s a wave of British settlers populated this area and the Wallaces are descendants. A Lord James Delaval Beresford was the original owner of our ranch where he settled with his Lady Flora a mulatto woman  now buried in Concordia cemetery in El Paso.  The University of Texas at El Paso published a booklet about them written by Eugene o. Porter.

This is the cross cultural world of northern Mexico that is little known or understood in the US.  I am a product of this culture as are my friends.

Photo Uncle Bill Wallace, my mother,Aida Gabilondo, me father Jose Martinez Solano, my Nina Virginia Wallace and my adored Tia Suky in Corralitos

I have uploaded photos of the haciendas and people involved n facebook  and Shutterfly

Link to Carmela’s House