"Good morning, Senorita."

"It's very beautiful today, no?"

"Yes, Senorita, it is very beautiful; yes, it certainly is."

"Maybe it won't rain today?"

"Well, yes, Senorita, I think it will rain; it will rain. But later." She invites you into her house--"Come in, Senorita, come in. It's very humble here, but...You wouldn't like a taco, Senorita?" And she hands you beans enveloped in a tortilla like the ones her children are eating.

Senora Dolores kneels outside her house, scrubbing the family's soiled clothes on a rock. Her small son sits in the large basket with the laundry. Flies perch on his sombrero and face until his mother lovingly brushes them away. The clean clothes hang on the nearby maguey to dry. "How do you like our town.?" she asks. "You are not bored?"

"No. I like it very much. Here the air is fresh and the climate is beautiful. And the people are very nice."

"Yes, here it is very tranquil." Senora Dolores moved from Mexico City when she married her husband six years ago. She found it difficult to adjust to country ways at first--she had never made a tortilla or scrubbed clothes on rocks before--but "You grow accustomed." Her husband won't let her go to the city to see her family because "if I went, I would stay," and he doesn't like her to make friends among the other village women.

"Why?"

"I don't know; he just doesn't like it." So she keeps to herself. You sit with her for awhile, gazing out at the hills and the two volcanoes. And then you're on your way.

"With your permission, Senora."

"Go then, Senorita, go then, if you must."

Her mother-in-law takes you to the spring to wash. She loads her burro with plastic bags full of clothes, in case it rains early, and sets off across the fields with her nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. She re-does your wash after your inadequate job and then her clothes and yours join the bright pattern on the smooth rocks. The little children make a game of washing, and romp through their day's work. The babies are strapped to the nearest tree in home-made hammocks of blanket and rope, safe from stray snakes or spiders.

When you return, you stroll across the road to Don Efren's house. He's sitting outside looking down at his foot, which is swollen and oozing from a week-old axe cut. He's been to the doctor in Calpulalpan, so it should be all right. His daughter, thin, bright-eyed Ofelia, comes out and tells you how she's going to go in the sixth grade in San Martin and then become a nurse. Her younger sisters, giggling wildly, hurl sombreros in the air and watch the wind take them. Her mother, Dona Rosa, invites you in for coffee and sweet breads that she bought from one of the two tiny stores and that Isac and his brother, bakers and sons of a baker, made one morning. Dona Rosa tells you of her fifteen-year-old son who went to live with an aunt in another town and got a fourteen-year-old girl pregnant because "he had to sleep in the same room with her." They married and separated. "Divorce is too expensive...Children are a heavy burden. Each one brings fresh trouble. And each year there's another one. I've had thirteen." Dona Rosa is 43 and pregnant. She shows you the picture of one of her daughters, dressed up in white for her fifteenth birthday, her coming of age.

You find Don Leonardo finishing his new house. He covers the adobe with a mixture of sand and lime, making the walls white and smooth. The doors and windows are trimmed in bright blue. You ask him, as president of the town, what he thinks of the Mexican government. Smiling, he shrugs his shoulders. "Well, Senorita, Echeverria--he is not a bad man; but he does nothing for the campesino. The rich men have money and they pay him and, well--so he can afford to do nothing."