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By Root 607 0

San Miguel has managed to retain its rustic, artsy, small-town charm. The town slowly reveals itself to me and surprises me, like the Spanish that has been lying dormant in my brain for so many years, which suddenly surfaces, as if being where I learned the language in the first place brings it all back. The atmosphere in San Miguel is slow and pleasant, as if they put lithium into the bottled water, but there is plenty to do. I explore the cactus collection and the trails hugging the canyon at the botanical gardens. I swim in the hot springs pool outside town—the place that lured people to settle here centuries ago, where I remember wondering, as a child, why the other kids wore their underwear instead of bathing suits. I make chiles en nogales at a cooking school in the country and read at a book club. I wander around innumerable art galleries and jewelry stores, which are quite democratic, in that it seems that anyone who has decided, after all these years, to try his or her hand at painting or silversmithing can exhibit his or her wares alongside those of a few real masters. And almost every night I dance—at parties, at clubs, and at salsa lessons, where, by the end of the evening, several drunken Mexican men half my age are begging to come home with me. I smooch a sexy Mexican musician after a jazz concert before I find out that he (like most seemingly available Latin men in their forties or fifties, especially musicians) is married.

Right away, I find that it’s easy to meet people here, especially women over forty, who are given to loose cotton tunics, stunning big jewelry, and heavy-soled shoes that are comfortable on the cobblestones. Perhaps because they’ve found other, mainly single women in like circumstances, the women in San Miguel are very social: you can walk outside your door, meet someone on the sidewalk for the first time, and get invited over.

On one of my first mornings I go to a yoga class and meet up with Paige, a fifty-year-old with spiky red hair, the only person I know from San Francisco. She meets me in the sunflower yellow Bellas Artes building, where you enter an enormous wooden door into the former convent courtyard and cross into a mirrored dance studio. The students, many well into their retired years, are amiable, cheerfully shifting their mats over to make room—not like in a crowded class in San Francisco or New York, where a yogini pretending to be meditating on the beauty of now is inwardly cursing the bitch four inches to the right who arrived late and is intruding on her space.

After class, Paige and I sit in a café on the jardín, under bloodred arches, the sun warming us as we shed early-morning layers. She tells me she came here with her partner on vacation and ended up deciding to return, partly because they met so many interesting women who are escapees from their previous lives, pursuing new paths.

“You run into so many women here who are divorced, widows, retired—and all of them are blooming,” Paige says. People fall in love with the place, she says, particularly given the favorable economics of living south of the border in a town with excellent gringo infrastructure (wireless Internet, English bookstores, organic vegetables, U.S. mailboxes). She and her partner took a bold step, giving up San Francisco altogether for Mexico. They sold their house, packed up their stuff, and are using the spoils of San Francisco’s real estate boom to stop working full-time and build the home they always dreamed of in the Mexican countryside. They’ll write, they’ll paint, they’ll figure out their next steps later on. Paige is animated, full of all the energy she says drained out of her in the past few years in San Francisco, working all the time, stuck in a harried routine to pay a bloated mortgage.

For now, she and her partner are living in a house they built last year, a temporary place while their house in the country is being built. We walk back to Guadalupe, their flat colonia, or neighborhood, just outside the historic center. Paige’s blood-orange casa has three bedrooms, a garage, a