Today is December 13, 2019 and it is damp and cold outside. It is dark. Melancholy has set in and a nostalgia for hotter climes beckons. Because I am 77 I am not interested in sitting under an umbrella at a sandy, Mexican beach sipping a Cuba Libre.

 I want the heat of a warm Mexican city, one far from the distraction of a beach. I want to be in my native Buenos Aires where it is hot and humid at this moment. I want a long Argentine summer day.

I could escape to a place that I lived when I was 16. 

It was Nueva Rosita, Coahuila. It was a small and very hot (but bitterly cold and dry in the winter) mining town where my mother taught in the American School that was there for the children of the engineers of American Smelting and Refining Company. Just a km from where we lived (the American Hotel) it was desert with agaves (not blue ones) and giant saguaros.

But there is a spot here in Vancouver that could be an escape. It would take me with a little imagination to a Mexican desert in Jalisco where the blue agaves grow.

This is the Macmillan Observatory at the top of Queen Elizabeth Park. This little tropical oasis of Vancouver has one very blue agave, Agave attenuata. It was there by that agave that I took the pictures you see here of my granddaughter Rebecca Stewart  and her sister Lauren who are both no longer little girls. Perhaps sometimes after Christmas I might persuade them to pose by it again.

I would certainly not complain of the heat.

But I must amend my statement that I do not miss a beach. I miss the port of Veracruz, Mexico. Its beaches do not have waves (the Gulf of Mexico) and the sand is not very white. But it was there in my mother’s house on Pinzón Street that Rosemary and I finally fell in love. We walked the Malecón on hot evenings savouring the smells of the sea mixed with cargo ship bunker oil and fish stalls. We walked hand in hand not saying much. Our eldest daughter Alexandra was most probably conceived there.