" Tierra...Tierra..."

Mérida is a place where vendors still come to your doorstep. This woman walks door do door selling dulce de pepita-- toasted squash seeds suspended in brown sugar, essentially. Very yummy.

Don't go thinking that the camera has somehow made this woman look short-- she is, like many Yucatecans, very small. I'm something of a giant here, towering at 5'4". I can only imagine the spectacle that my friend Eric would create with all 6 feet and 4 inches of his whole self walking around Mérida.

Each vendor has his/her own unique way of alerting you to their presence. The knife sharpening man plays a tune on his pan flute as he walks around, sharpening facilities welded to the top of a bicycle frame in a way that allows him to use the pedal to work the whetstone. Lucky for me he stopped by, as my one knife did, in fact, need sharpening.

Then man who sells dirt stops by about once a week, singing "tierra... tierra...", and there it is: bags of gardening soil in his horse-drawn cart. "Look at my horse," he might say. "He's very tired. Don't you want to buy some dirt?" He tugs at my sympathies, but I don't budge.

Since then, I've gone out to my garden and considered... yes, I'll be listening for his one-word song and the percussion of hooves on ashfalt. It's a small price to pay for the way things used to be.