[We’re recounting the procedure for becoming a temporary Mexican resident. The entire series is here, in reverse order]

We’d made a terrible mistake. That’s our stock in trade: mistakes. We were in Mexico last October, and we entered into a rental contract starting in March 2026. If there is a better definition of “your ass in the breeze,” I have not seen it. We can’t afford one set of rents. Two gets comical, and we’d have to start elbowing the cat out of the way and eating out of her bowl. But we were tired of the AirBnB life, and weary, after one try, of renting a pig in a poke of an apartment, like we did in Augusta.

While we were there, we got a tour of our prospective Mexican casa, and more importantly, we got to hang around the neighborhood all day. We could see they weren’t testing missiles next door. There was no rendering plant across the street. No halfway houses for murderers who won’t go all the way nearby. We were especially interested in avoiding another gay disco over the back wall. We enjoyed that once, at an AirBnB in Santa Lucia. The nightly throom, throom, throom still rings in my ears a bit. There is no cure, only palliative care.

The casa on offer suited us fine, and the neighbors were regular folks for the most part. We had avoided “Gringo Gulch,” the locals half-joking sobriquet for the AirBnB rental ghetto for expats.  But we were still in the heart of things. So we took a wild guess, and thought October to March would be enough time to get our affairs in order. We were nearly right. We’ve found that nearly right is right enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and international travel.

But I ask you. Could you pare down your possessions to fit in four large suitcases, a carryon, and a cat in a sack to stuff under the plane seat? That’s what we were attempting. We ended up with only thirty days to accomplish it. Oh, and by the way, each suitcase can only weigh fifty pounds, max. That’s what we were up against.

And oh, that cat. If we gave up our apartment in Maine, we’d have to walk out the door with the cat under our arm and board a plane the same day. Not bloody likely. A cat is worse than a toddler. We couldn’t camp out, literally or figuratively, for a short interregnum between households. Not literally camp out, because actual camping in Maine in February is considered brisk even by esquimau standards. Only the cat would survive, now that I think of it, and she can’t fly alone. And camping out in the short term rental world ain’t easy if you bring a cat. We came up with a solution.

We built a Time Masheen and took a short jog back through the calendars to our younger days and had two sons instead of purse dogs, iPhones, and eight dollar lattes every day. By the time our predicament rolled around in the present, these children were huge adult people with opinions and shaving gear and driver’s licenses. They offered to move our furniture out of our apartment after we left.

One is suspicious of instructions to leave the country ASAP when you get them from your children. It is possible that my wife raised two pleasant and helpful humans. The alternative explanations are too grim to contemplate.

We had already flensed the whale of our belongings when moving from a giant Victorian house to a pokey pied-a-terre in the metrop of Augusta. We pulled a tremendous dodge to get rid of a lot of our furniture. There was an antique marketplace in the next town. It rented booths by the month, and then manned the checkout line to collect the tariffs on whatever junque some unsuspecting stranger might buy. Since our belongings were either flea market finds, or phony antiques I had made, we fit right in. We priced everything lower than market rates, so the stuff more or less ran out the door. The people who ran it would occasionally scratch their heads when we sold something like an antique bench, and I’d show up the next day with another one just like it. They never did catch on the the true reason we were renting the booth was the square footage of the booth was cheaper by the month than the square footage of a self-storage locker. Getting any money for the stuff was gravy. We ended up selling almost everything, and we gave the few remaining things to the lady across the antique store aisle.

I spent two solid weeks taking digital scans of every document and photo we’d accumulated over the years. If anyone wants a copy of a photo of me grimacing at my high school graduation, taken by my mother, I’ve got one. I put all my important tax documents into a hard drive, which I hoped would fall out of the cargo hold at 12,000 feet. If the plane went down in flames, everyone else would have screamed and rent their garments all the way as we spiraled into the ocean. I’d be sitting there with a beatific look on my face, secure in the knowledge that the hard drive was going to be smashed or drowned along with me. Cheaper than travel insurance, too. The hard part was the books.

Jayzuz, the books. We might have 1,000 of them, I don’t know. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. I don’t buy bad books very often, so I never have a big box of Dan Brown books out on the curb for the trash man, to free up shelf space. My wife doesn’t read trivial stuff either. You don’t give 100-year-old hardcover Henry James novels the heave-ho when you’re done with them. The usual route of lending them to friends and relatives doesn’t work for us, either. Everyone my wife knows reads ghostwritten autobiographies of second-string Red Sox shortstops. I’d give them a pass if it was Rico Petrocelli, but it’s always some imbecile from ten years ago with cogent advice on how to step out of the batter’s box seventeen times to adjust their batting gloves. We can’t give our books to the library, either.  They’d  burn our books in pyre outside the coven of perversion they’re running, and dream of doing the same to us. They hate Shakespeare now. What chance does my Kipling have?

It was easy to pack away the yards of shelves of books about furniture and building stuff. Where I’m going, everything is Fred Flintstone in the architecture department. There isn’t enough wood in the whole of Yucatan to build a picnic table, never mind a house. After that, it got harder. We set up a biblio-triage, holding up a second edition Life on the Mississippi and a 1946 translation of Don Quixote. Cervantes won, but mostly because Twain himself thought it was one of the greatest books ever written, and I had already earmarked ten Twain books for the Go pile, and my wife said enough, basta, and demasiado at the same time.

[to be continued]