
Mexico City interior, sketched in 2018.
On Monday evening, we’re hoping to board an Air Canada jet and fly to Mexico City. Watching the snow fall all day, and listening to the strong winds howling outside my window, I’m glad our flight isn’t scheduled for tonight, because I’m not sure it would take off. There’s more snow coming over the weekend. Fingers crossed.

Same room, different angle. On the couch is a sweater-in-progress that I was knitting — and now wear all the time. I packed that same little ink bottle and sea sponge today.
For six or seven years, we went to Mexico City for a couple of weeks nearly every winter. Our last trip was in 2018. We had planned to go there in early March 2020: ill-fated timing. Here’s the beginning of a blog entry back then:
Monday, March 8, 2020
We were supposed to be waking up this morning in the warmth and color of Mexico City, but instead, I'm looking out the window at wan sunshine on melting ice, and the grey snow that lines the streets of Montreal. Like many other people, we reluctantly cancelled our travel plans at the last minute -- in fact, half an hour before we were going to call the taxi to the airport -- and have been trying to re-set our heads as well as our clocks, and adjust to an unpredictable and uncharted short-term future.
In the next paragraphs I write about what we’ll be doing “for the next weeks.” My choices of words brought home the optimism many of us felt — that the period of caution would be over in a matter of weeks or a few months. I wonder what we all would have done if we’d been told the pandemic would last for years, disrupt all of our lives, and cause the deaths of so many millions of people. Good thing we didn’t know. And I wonder what I’ll feel, looking back at this post five years from now, written at the beginning of another unpredictable and scary period of time.

A watercolor of a red bottle-brush tree flower, Mexico City, 2017.
Tonight, after a day where the view from my window resembled Siberia, I’m trying to concentrate on sunshine and the colors of painted stucco, bougainvillea, and jacaranda trees. I spent time this afternoon getting my art supplies in order, cleaning my small watercolor palette box, making a swatch strip to make sure those were the colors I wanted to take, cleaning and refilling fountain pens, choosing a small group of mechanical pencils and travel brushes, and packing it as efficiently as possible.
I’m anxious to see how my sketching has improved since I was last in Mexico City. There’s so much detail and complexity in every view — this used to be a big problem for me but I hope I’ve gotten better. The biggest obstacle I anticipate is not having enough hours for it, since we always go with the intention to take plenty of time for photography and drawing, but end up doing far more moving around each day than we planned. For the first part of the trip, we’ll be staying in Mexico City itself, and then we’ll move to the quieter southern area of Coyoacan.
I look forward to sending you some pictures of beauty from our North American neighbor in the south. I also hope that it will be a restorative and strengthening period of time, and that I return with renewed hope in humanity and more ideas for what I can do to help.
