And we talked to some people at the tire store, I learned a new word: Tlacuache, when we checked the dictionary later on, we found it is a Spanish derivative of the indigenous Nahuatl word: tlacuatzin. It is used in Mexico as a word to describe the animal known on this side of the border as the opossum. We talked about the flavor of armadillos, which used to be much more common in Central Texas, and molé sauce, a Mexican specialty sauce with many, many ingredients, the most outstanding of which is chocolate. We talked about searching for deer in the rural areas of southern Mexico.


And it brought back memories of a far distant evening that I had, sitting in some small village or town named Vallodalid or a village nearby in the far south of Mexico, perhaps in the Yucatan, where a local woman approached me during a sunset dinner I was having at an outdoor restaurant, I remember the meal was some kind of venison, which is what they had available for dinner that night, I think it was deer. The woman asked me if I wanted to by one of her hammocks, which was carefully woven by hand in an intricate pattern of blue and white. I used that hammock for years, and just parted with its recently, because the walls in the places I was staying in have been not much more than cardboard, and far too flimsy to support the heavy weight of a hammock with me lying inside.

But I remember using it for years in the hot weather, in a 20s era building without air conditioning, sort of stretching out horizontally, being cushioned by soft threads of the hammock, and using a small fan under the hammock to cool myself on the 100+ degree hot days. I would pull on a handy rope attached to a nearby pipe to keep rocking back and forth while trying to escape the heat with some self generated breezes.

It made the summer almost bearable with one of those to recline in overnight. And then I walked out of the tire shop and admired the clouds, and I thought long enough to remember to take a cell-phone picture of a tiny portion of the cloud-studded sky. My tire was soon fixed, and I drove off into the setting sun of the afternoon. Not so many books listed today, but the orders kept coming in for most of the morning, so it was still a busy day. No books to sell tonight, just a picture of the sky with little bits of water vapor.