Tag Archives: magical

Colonia San Antonio, photography, San Miguel de Allende, Uncategorized

Once seen …

The four good sisters were walking in tight black-and-white formation up Calle Ancha de San Antonio on Friday, Sept. 23, 2022, around 9 a.m.

That’s it. Nothing more to it. They just made me feel like smiling. Who wouldn’t smile at seeing a happy scrum of nuns?

I thought they were headed into a scrum with the tourist cluster headed down the sidewalk, but they stayed their formation and the visiting team blinked.

I’m sure pleasantries were exchanged by all. That’s just the way it is in Magical San Miguel.

Seen on Calle Cuna de Allende

Flower power along the busy Calle Cuna de Allende, next to the Parroquia de San Miguel de Arcangel in Centro.

In the doorway of El Alcazar restaurant and hotel, a couple painstakingly added real roses to the living floral doorframe.

Who wouldn’t want to walk through such a door on their way to dinner? Be it ever so fleeting an experience.

The gorgeous frame was created on Friday and gone by Monday.

Several doors down, this floral frame at Uri Zatarin Art Gallery was built to last, out of silk flowers. It was still there on Monday evening, as beautiful as ever.

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photography, San Miguel de Allende, Uncategorized, Writings

Friday in the Park with Moppit

Hermes Arroyo walks past a collection of his mojigangas on the old basketball court, awaiting their chance to lead wedding parties through Parque Juarez on Friday evening.

Moppit the Philosopher Dog is pretty insistent that I take her for a walk, no more than 10 minutes after she finishes her 5 p.m. dinner. She is a creature of habit. Moppit starts a huff-snorting sound around my ankles if I’m not reaching for the leash, the kind of sound a woman makes when the husband comes home late smelling of booze and perfume and mumbles “biznish shmeeting.”

lately, it has been in the high 80s around 5 p.m. here in San Miguel de Allende, so I try to reason with her.

But a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

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San Miguel de Allende, Writings

The pensive princess in the park

One shot. That’s all you get.

Magic abounds in San Miguel de Allende.

But it can be fleeting.

An open door.

A loving embrace.

A child’s smile.

A musician’s final note.

You are there. You happen upon the moment.

And you either lock it in your memory or …

… god forgive me, you pull out your camera.

The princess sat in Parque Juarez, near the gazebo.

Her face went to that place that princesses so often go to

When men dressed all in black with lights and baffles and screens

Scurry around her, trying to capture the fading light at dusk.

Her eyes turn inward, her thoughts go to … where?

A mantra? A shopping list? A party invite? A lover?

A magic spell to cast over her portraiture minions?

A first glimpse of her is through the vee

In this ancient split-trunk pine.

She could have been a woodland fairie,

Queen of the forest,

Mistress of the mystical realm.

Mab, Titania, Oonagh, Gloriana, Diana

The Queen of Elphame.

Meliae or Dryad, those Greecian nymphs of ashes and oaks.

But, more, a beautiful woman with sadness about her

As she waited for that special moment.

To come alive,

To conjure enchantment, and send it to the lens.

Immortalizing the fairie princess in her sylvan realm.

Real. Not real.

Magical, all the same.

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