The Gentle Welcome of February in Oaxaca

Oaxaca's "shoulder season" offers delights and February is the best month.

February arrived with the lightness of a dragonfly alighting on the surface of a pond, and with it came visitors.

Winter is a time of year that encourages fantasizing about foreign and presumably warmer places, and this particular winter season has been a bad one. Not only did November raise the collective bile of most of the intelligent world by ushering in a new era of American fascism and broad political pestilence, it also kicked off several consecutive months of poor weather. Significant portions of the U.S. have been blanketed by snow and encrusted with ice. It’s been too much, for too many people, and as you might expect inquiries about Oaxaca and the availability of our guest rooms are rising.

While we have guests fairly consistently, there’s no doubt the tone of the inquiries has begun to change. There are months of the year when if a friend were to ask over the phone, “How’s the weather?” the question is small talk and not a real inquiry about our meteorological status. Few people truly want to hear, “Oh, it’s been lovely! I’m wearing shorts right now” while they’re bundled up in a thick sweater and in the process of cellophaning their drafty apartment windows shut.

People are feeling desperate, though. In December the question, “How’s the weather?” began to be accompanied by a hopeful pause. Those who would once have been irritated by a recitation of how nice it is and how we’re sleeping with our balcony doors open now welcome a rhapsodic description of clear, sunny days, pool water warmed by the sun, and fresh tacos made steps from our door.

Our longstanding position is that we welcome visitors, and our most recent batch began arriving in December, the day after Christmas. First were Julia, Andrea’s sister, and her husband Tobias, who flew to us from Switzerland and stayed for about a week. Mere days after they departed Andrea’s mom arrived, another week-long guest who was fleeing the short days and relentless cold of rural Montana. A week or so later came Eli and his wife Brandi, two friends from New Hampshire who were desperate to escape the slate grey doldrums that a grim New England winter brings on. And three days after they departed my own parents arrived, also pursuing a reprieve from the frigid north.

Everyone who’s come to see us has expressed great interest in meeting and spending time with our son Leo, who at three months old is both tremendously cute and also has developed enough that he’s becoming fun to spend time with, instead of merely being a sentient potato in dinosaur pajamas who can’t stop pooping and barfing. But Leo and the fact that we keep the pool clean and ready for swimmers aren’t the only things motivating our guests. As the U.S. deteriorates and teeters on the verge of true collapse people’s horizons have begun to expand, and future guests now include those who have either begun to think about the possibility of leaving the U.S., or who are actively involved in that process and will soon move to either Mexico, Canada, or Europe.

Mexico is a country of fantasies, and I think it beguiles people prone to daydreaming. You’d have to be at least a little bit of a dreamer to see a photo or a video of a place the world insists is unsafe, unhealthy, and unwelcoming, and think, “Maybe I should go there.” But while many people still don’t know that the U.S. is the primary purchaser of Mexico’s drugs and the overwhelming supplier of its illegal firearms, they do understand shitty weather. The grey, miserable chill of February has washed the joy from their soul and left them feeling like a frost-bleached skeleton in a shallow, frozen grave. The music of Mexico beckons them.

Oaxaca has two main seasons, la temporada de lluvia (the rainy season) and la temporada seca (the dry season), with many sub-seasons sprinkled in between. We’re in one of those sub-seasons right now, a glorious stretch of about 8 weeks when the tranquil mountain nights dip into the low 50s and the days are a steady 76 degrees with clouds peacefully scudding their way across the sky. There are virtually no mosquitos and the walls of the palapa shimmer with wavy blue light reflected from the surface of our pool.

Oaxaca, in general, is a place of shelter. When hurricanes are obliterating places like oceanside Acapulco, Oaxaca’s particular placement along the Pacific coast more-or-less shields it from those same storms. Where we live, in the high-altitude mountains and valleys of the Valles Centrales, the primary enemy is drought, not heat. Our winter is mild and lasts all of six weeks, with the lowest temperature we’re likely to experience being around 38 degrees.

Shelter is an important motif for both Andrea and myself. A future newsletter entry I’ve already begun drafting is about the naming of our house, Casa Secreta—Secret House—and we are exceptionally selective about who we allow to pass through our gates and enter our walls. But my writing about our life in Oaxaca, and more broadly in Mexico, quickly became about more than just relaying to others what it’s been like for us. We’ve found shelter in a place that the wider world would prefer people think is unstable and dangerous.

Negative characterizations about Mexico aren’t entirely untrue, either. This is without a doubt a flawed place, and I won’t dishonor the trod-upon, injured, and murdered by making it seem like our particularly privileged lives are how every person here lives. But as so many other parts of the world get so much worse, so quickly, and as the United States hurtles toward an unfixable fracturing, the appeal of this country, and this particular part of Mexico, only becomes greater. The fact that we don’t have snow doesn’t hurt either.

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