The heat has been higher, but this is extremely persistent. It’s been at about 104 F for over a week and another week to go. I wrote Elvia in Coatepec that it was 41 C. and she could hardly believe it.

My two horses stand in front of the mist-producing nozzles all day long. All the rest of the critters are in air-conditioning. I am trying to save my trees. All over town people are putting out umbrellas on their fences and gateposts as a kind of joking appeal for rain.

So I am watering my trees a LOT before we are put under water rationing. The dust is pervasive and it’s affecting my allergies but there’s something horribly gorgeous about it all.

Next week I am flying to Veracruz where Elvia and Jaime will pick me up and we’ll drive back to Coatepec which is at 3000 feet, cool rainy!!! I get to stay in the same wonderful room in the big Ortiz house as I did last year. Elvia’s book group is not meeting until the beginning of the academic year but she says she has a lot of reading to share with me, I am still going back and forth between the English and Spanish version of Juan Rulfo’s El Llano en Llamas. The stories are incredibly revealing about the conditions of the common people during the Mexican Revolution. Great reading. Also working on the Great Trilogy, entitled 88.3.

And it’ll be all the way down to 102 when I fly out of San Antonio! A cold snap!