LAKE CHAPALA HOMECOMING

Battle worn, retired, yet buoyant I arrived from Detroit City into Western Mexico's heartland accompanied by C.C. (Construction Cat). We took a cab from the airport hauling three suitcases, one of them containing my favorite pillow, several yards of precious fabric, pesticides, rat killer, and a flashlight. My fears are few, but include rats and spiders.

We were to spend that night, behind the high walls that hid our new home on Las Redes, a cobblestone street on the fringes of the town of Chapala. I was arriving to start the beginning of the end of my life's journey; instead, life's process keeps marching on. Once again, I have built an environment much the same as I always have. Only the cast of characters, the setting, and the cost of living has changed. In other words, I am extraordinarily blessed to be living here at Lake Chapala.

The house was built as a weekend party place by a wealthy Guadalajaran and had been long abandoned. It was small and extremely strange inside, but the hacienda porch that was wrapped around it was welcoming. The expansive yard contained not one bush, nothing but perfectly cut grass, a bandstand, and a fancy restroom with a drunken gardener living inside.

It had all been recently painted a flashing fluorescent orange. "Oh my God," I hollered as the saleswoman who was showing the property, full of apologies, tugged at my arm and dragged me out. It was too late; the place had already spoken to me.

After I moved in I added a wing onto the house, and then the second story went up. The construction workers were so nice to be around; they shared their bean tacos with me while I brought them refrescos (sodas), soaking up their smiles while I sat on piles of brick.

They kept giving me estimates that I couldn't refuse; I kept just ahead of them, designing one project after the other. We built an art gallery and painting studio across the back of the property. I swore I would kick the compulsion for construction, and believed I could become a delicate "seniorita" when I moved to Mexico.

My rude awakening came when the window washer fresh from the US counted 47 windows that needed to be washed at $20 pesos a window, or $30 pesos both sides. Had I really sold the historic 19th century Victorian I spent eight years restoring only to buy another with exactly the same number of windows screaming to be washed? Was I again to become a slave to inert materials? I let my gardener go in an economic gesture. I could do it myself in just two hours a day, besides, I thought, I miss smelling the flowers.

"I'm a painter; want to come to my opening in El Refugio?" I asked José, a popular secondary teacher in Mezcala, his students crunching into and around my shiny pickup bed, their parents peering from dark doorways in curiosity.

(Left:) Janice spent a year photographing Mezcala's student dancers (here in their costumes for the famous dance of the old men). (Right:) This exhibit display demonstrates the many designs she has created from those images.

A year later, after eating much dust on the then long dirt road leading into that indigenous fishing village, I had photo documented the student dancers participating in the many festivals there. Kimball Gallery opened, I received a real brass medal as a Jalisco artist and that resulted in being included in a show in the Cabañas, and Jacqueline Stewart appeared in my life.

She masterminded the smashing activities and exhibitions we had at my gallery. Our goal was to foster fellowship between the Mexican and foreign art communities, and we succeeded. Our enticements of free food, entertainment and drinks worked marvelously well in getting even the most reticent Mexican artist to take a bus into Chapala from their distant art communities.

Next, I had a show at the new Efren Gonzalez Gallery in Bugambilias Mall, dying my white hair a temporary orange to match the balloons Efren strung across the highway and became a red head forever. It was a great two years. Then, the Kimball Gallery ran out of money.

There was a knocking at my front gate. "We found a painting studio for you, so you can join us," two of my favorite Mexican artist's chimed enthusiastically in Spanish. It was $1,500 pesos a month, there was a room and bath with a shared courtyard to paint in, located in the rear portion of what was a large art gallery in central Ajijic.

I took it, but turned down the free lunches the groups of men who met daily offered me as I painted in the courtyard beside them. They lunched on Nightmare Soup prepared by the director's teenage daughters in the gallery kitchen. Whatever the starving artists were able to contribute (half developed ears of corn, fish with heads, entrails, chicken tails, overripe tomatoes and other things I could only guess at) were thrown into a large pot and then served with tortillas and hot sauce and a generous lacing of tequila.

(Left:) Some of my Huichol friends meet with Dionicio Morelos at the gallery. (Right:) Teo's loom was set up in the courtyard of the gallery when I met him.

The Huichol, the indigenous group of pre-Hispanic people, also hung out there. They spent afternoons squatting around me watching me work. We spoke a similar broken Spanish slowly, lacking in verbs or other vernacular niceties.

There were things I was not told when I rented my studio. Outside the gallery's back door was an alley, strewn with trash. Behind it was an immense partly tumbled stone wall; it was so high I couldn't see over it, but it could be crawled over. Behind that was a large piece of vacant property landlocked by buildings. This is where the San Andrés Huichol community lived.

They set up makeshift tents and cooked over open fires. Our gallery was their entrance and exit to the street that led to the Ajijic plaza. They silently padded through the courtyard in their soft huaraches (sandals) almost not noticed. I grew very fond of José Luis, an elf-like irresistible dancer of spirits as he sighed, "It is beautiful" in English, as I painted. He made me realize the underlying reason the Huichol seemed taken with me. I had rented their bathroom, at least the bathroom of the grown men. They each in turn made a formal request to use it, which I granted, and it again became theirs. After that I became "family."

Teo did not speak English, or understand my Spanish, but, other than that we had a lot in common. We had both lived alone for 15 years. He had a crush on me, and was always waiting when I arrived in the morning to carry my things.

Everything changed after he arrived in the gallery. The alley became a garden, the girls were happier because he helped with the dishes and planted flowers in the courtyard. I took note of his charming smile.

(Left:) Teo was a hat wearing, rope trick twirling Jocotepec weaver when Janice met him at her studio. (Right:) Family pet parrot Maximo grooms Teo's moustache at the Aztec Gallery in western Ajijic.

We made trips to his old hometown of Jocotepec to pick up the parts of an ancient loom, which, when assembled would be the size of a small room. It was set it up in the gallery. His first weaving was a gift for me, a tapestry of Quetzalcoatl, the flying serpent, elegant in black and white, a most marvelous gift. The first time Teo came to my house was to say goodbye. Standing in the kitchen doorway, he told me that he could not find work in Mexico, so he was returning to the US. I made a lightning decision and asked him to live with me.

Hardly pausing he said, "Then will you be my spouse?" When I nodded he asked, "Can I come in to use your phone? I need to tell my daughter I will not be coming home tonight." We were together for five years and nursed each other through serious illness and back to health.

We opened Kimball-Urzua gallery in Ajijic after selling the property in Chapala; then we bought a commercial site on the main highway below Rancho Del Oro. Only 15 feet wide, it is deep, going back like a railroad siding, with walls as high as the property is wide.

It was another party place, a windowless room at the back filled with bunk beds, but with no closet, and just an outside kitchen, dark and dreary. Trudging up rusted metal steps to the roof, we realized the property sits on an embankment and before our eyes lay an astounding 360 degree panorama of the lake, mountains and the charming fishing village of Ajijic.

(Left:) It may have been a rundown previous party property to most buyers, but Janice Kimball saw a gallery with a home hidden within. (Right:) Ahh, Janice's vision has come to fruition. The Kimball Gallery is warm and welcoming.

After a lifetime of altering others building plans, it was an architectural challenge I could not resist. We had lived like pack rats in the one room, our things pared down to the computer, a bed, art and weaving supplies, boxes of photos and writings piled almost to the ceiling.

Teo's loom was set up in the outside kitchen under a clear tarp to keep out the dust and rain as he continued to weave all day, every day. His son, Francisco, set up a tent on the roof, industriously canopied by the blue plastic swimming pool he salvaged from the front yard and inverted over his mattress. When we emerged two years later from behind the piles of construction material we dusted ourselves off and opened for business sans windows and doors. I had again run out of money.

We spent that time wisely, preparing to open the art gallery and weaving studios. Teo wanted to name it Aztec, after the weaving center he once owned on Morelos (now the Tango restaurant), and so it was. It has since been renamed Janice Kimball Studios and Gallery to reflect my history as an artist.

(Left:) Francisco spends his days creating paintings in yarn at a 300-year-old mesquite family loom. Its design is the same as those brought to the new world on Spanish ships. (Right:) Francisco's concentration pays off in his extraordinary weavings.

It has not been without struggle, but we have been able to finish the construction, acquire furniture, look respectable, support various animals, and help numerous friends — all in all, quite a modest success. Teo has been able to retire and Francisco has taken over the generational tradition, still weaving on these ancient looms he learned to weave on when he was a child. Teo taught him to weave on the same loom Teo had learned the art from his grandfather before him.

Francisco is passionate about weaving. I can see him here, weaving on these ancient looms long after I am gone—maybe the last of his kind—and it pleases me. I love not knowing where my beginnings will take me — journeys are so much more interesting that way.

An opportunity presented itself that led me to discover the expatriate spirit of this extended American/Canadian community, a connection I had long neglected, when I was offered the opportunity to exhibit (and sell) our paintings and weavings during the months of February and March 2010 in the office and Neill James Library of the Lake Chapala Society. It was perfect timing, I was happy to have a nice tribute paid to as closure to Teo's weaving career.

Janice and Francisco are well prepared to continue to create interlinking projects…just as Janice did with Teo, her step-son's father.

Gringos sometimes make me nervous. I get the feeling that I can't do anything right, and yup, sure enough I get foot in mouth disease. The tables were turned on me as I showed up at the LCS with an overkill of paintings and weavings to hang in every possible spot, I must have been acting as if I was waiting to be hit or something. And the response of the foreigners there?

I was met with smiles, the smiles were everywhere. I actually began to feel a little comfortable, and then I noticed that they spoke English. "Thank you, thank you," I kept saying; boy, was I ever hungry for English. My Spanish is falling victim to my hearing loss and my growing impatience with it.

My belief is this; it's not what you get, when you get what it is you are going after. It's the process that makes the life. The process needs to enrich you and give you the desire to carry on. The product is just the end.

My story will always be a familiar one to me; my life process is much as it has always been, no matter how much I try to change it, I am still carrying myself around with me. I get up to self-made deadlines and create more projects in my sleep. My mind sometimes skips; I love too much and I get too angry.

Returning home from the Lake Chapala Society I shout at Francisco and my bilingual helper Fernando, from whom I have never heard anything but Spanish. "I hate Spanish, I am sick of Spanish, from now on this is an English-speaking household!"

The cats look up and Maria, the turtle, dives back into the water. Maximo, the parrot, shouts "Good morning."

Francisco says "I learn Engliss," and Fernando says, "Me too," and I know, for sure, that I am home, no matter what language we speak.