Caught in the Rain September 1
When it rains in most places in Mexico, it pours.
Yesterday we walked from our house to see the annual fair at Tlaltenango. This is a fair that happens every year in front of the first chapel to be built in the Americas! Or so says the place on the front of the simple, cozy chapel, with the dates of 1521-1523 on the plaque.
The fair is important as a celebration of the miracles said to have been granted by the small, lovely virgin above the altar in the larger chapel built next to the original one. A main avenue in Cuernavaca, Avenida Emilano Zapata, is closed for the entire week for this fair. Traffic is rerouted through parallel avenues and lines of cars crawl through nearby neighborhoods.
The vendors were just setting up their stalls on the newly closed street as we walked among them. It was a busy scene of Mexicans doing something that they have to get good at–making something out of nothing. They were patiently transforming a street into a fair, erecting their metal frame stalls, covering them with tarps, and stacking their wares in colorful, plentiful displays. In one stall that sells pottery bowls, mugs, and other kitchenware a toddler was proudly helping her parents to stack the breakable mugs. In another, native women, wearing their traditional dresses and accessories where hanging hand-embroidered dresses and blouses. Up the road two women in their 60s were scaling a ladder to fix their frame stall.
During the week, the vendors stay in their trucks, parked in nearby streets, and spend hours on end in the cramped spaces behind their stalls. Crowds of families and teenagers throng up and down the double row of stalls, eating the treats and buying the things for sale. At the church various celebrations take place and people can walk behind the altar to see the virgin.
Last night, the rain clouds were dark, but to the south of Cuernavaca. Since rain usually comes from the north or east, the storm snuck up on us. Suddenly, the drops began as a thick mist. Soon the rain was pelting down in huge, soft balls of moisture. We paused under an awning, but it was clear that the rain wasn’t going to let up soon. The street was running deeper and deeper–a rain-speckled river. Taxi cabs were starting to through splashes onto our feet, then our ankles, then our knees…. We finally had to run for it through the streets. Another family passed us, giggling, the mom holding the hand of the oldest and the father carrying a three-year-old hiding under his father’s coat.
We had our own little one in a child carrier backpack with my wool ski cap covering his head and neck and my sweatshirt absorbing the water before it could soak his shirt. Crossing the road the water was ankle deep. It had been years since I had had feet so wet that the water squished and flowed around my feet as I moved. We came inside, where it was dry, but there is no heat, closed the curtains and stripped to our skivvies, then changed into warm, dry clothes. Probably we had more fun in the surprise rain storm than at the fair.