Greetings from Oaxaca...again?
Tonight is the star attraction- but today we eat grasshoppers.

...and being at ria's wedding makes me feel sentimental. Sentimental for my own wedding, and the emotions and sounds and flavors of that time (just a few weeks ago). The happy couple, frantic in their happiness and shuffled by the way time moves differently those days and hours before. Wishing it could slow down a little. Wishing it would hurry up and be over with already. Two weeks later, I still do not know my own name sometimes.

I'm remembering too, us as girls together and I am laughing under this rehersal dinner tent at the thought of what our toast would sound like. How we invited gungas over to her parents house when they were out of town- to go swimming and drink beer--just having to keep the lights down as not to raise the suspicions of her deaf grandmother. How she chipped her tooth that one night on "the bridge" coming back from from Juarez from making out with a boy. (just learning I guess). Or that time she pulled my head out of the toilet and scrubbed my teeth with a wash cloth as my cool new college boyfriend was walking up the sidewalk...'You'll thank me later'.

These things seem too sacred to me somehow. Is that ridiculous? So even though we don't talk but a few times a year- that's why she's at my wedding softly and I at hers. Because the cobwebs somehow flash all tidy like that day: just as the elders explain the flash in your eyes the day one dies. So it's appropriate that this day happen the weekend just before the 'Day of the Dead'. That I see Oaxaca just one more time. This time with my husband, my partner for life.

I am pinching this town- just to make sure Mexico is still real. (And that girl I knew too!)