06162016Thu
Last updateFri, 10 Jun 2016 6am

Beneath the heavens’ celestial   fire, campesinos untangle barbed  wire, set spiny, bolder-footed fences

Country folks, as usual, swore inventively at the baking May temperatures of their countryside fields this year. 

Some planted early, sure rain was eminent. Others waited, costales (gunny sacks) filled with seed carefully protected from rodents.

Despite features of modernismo, fields were being splayed across hard-to-reach,  
boulder-fenced mountainsides.

It’s  slash-and-burn for Paco Arias and his family, though only two of us were dodging the sky’s celestial bonfire.

Campo lore had warned of a searing estiaje (dry season), and right now Paco and I took cover beneath a crook-branched mesquite. There, it was quiet. Nothing moved, not even insects, just the shadow of a single zoplote (buzzard) hunting on unmoving wings that molded flight from a high, slight breeze we cannot feel.

Paco and I — despite my rank-horse-bent back — have been repairing barbed-wire, bolder-based, huisache-spined fencing that kids, rain and wind-storms wrecked, strings of fencing leveled since last October.

Paco and I — he much more swiftly — have been lacing tall huisache branches into the upper strands of the barbed wire.  Controlling stock — and curious interlopers.  

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