My husband Tom and I flew into Santiago, Chile, bordered by snow-covered Andes mountains on April 19 to attend our son’s wedding to a Chilean lady.
We drove 150 miles to the village of Alhue through miles of irrigated fields containing all varieties of fruit trees, onions, potatoes, strawberries and grape vineyards.
My first impression of the village of Alhue nestled in the majestic foothills of the Andes mountains in central Chile was nostalgia. Alhue is like the small Mississippi town where I grew up in the 1930s.
The homes are made of combinations of tin, adobe, wood and brick. Most were rebuilt after the 1985 earthquake that destroyed 90 percent of the structures.
The tiny yards are clean-swept, packed clay with crude wire or wood fences that delineate property lines and keep out roaming livestock. Orange, lime, avocado, pear, fig, kiwi and other fruit trees fill each yard among the clotheslines.
Most yards have domed or barrel-shaped adobe ovens that provide bread or empanadas for family use and for selling. Some fires are built beneath the oven. In others, the fire is built inside the oven and embers are pushed aside to allow baking.
An empanadas is dough folded over a mixture of meat, olives, raisins, onions and gravy. One entrepreneur built an adobe oven onto the back of an old Citroen car and baked empanadas on site.
Church people bought hot lunch from his trailer and got vegetables from carts set up on the street. We ate these unique sandwiches hoping the fire had made them sanitary.
Alhue has a town square bordered by the Catholic church and small stores containing groceries, livestock, food and hardware. Tom said his small home collection of tools was more than the hardware store contained. There is also a butcher shop. You choose the cut of meat you want right from the carcass of the animal hanging before you.
A horse-pulled garbage wagon travels through the village and vendors pass through hawking their wares by sounding car horns. For example, the milk truck horn sounds exactly like the moo of a cow. Bicycle carts vend fruits and vegetables around the streets.
Housewives are seen rolling wheelbarrows into town on the dusty roads to bring  groceries home. Cowboys wearing serapes and sombreros ride their horses along the streets beside ladies pushing baby carriages.
We stopped at one home and were offered all we could eat from a massive fruit garden. We ate sweet pomegranates popped open from the sun, green seedless grapes, plums, oranges and prickly pears.
Everywhere we went we were presented small gifts and faces literally beamed when we accepted their offerings.
The Alhue countryside is covered with rocks and boulders. Numerous varieties of cacti grow in the clay soil all over the mountains. The rivers run full with snow melt from the surrounding mountains, but are otherwise dry.
Agriculture and mining are the chief industries in Chile. The gold mine in Alhue has been producing a good grade of gold for over 100 years. Our son met his bride while consulting at the mine.
Rocks are cut from the mine and transported to a processing plant in  trucks which can easily drive though large tunnels. The three steps in processing include various stages of crushing until there is nothing left but a dust as fine as talc. This talc is put through a chemical bath making a paste-like foam which is scooped off and refined into bars.
The wedding was held in the church, which was decorated with flowers  purchased at a flower market in Santiago, three hours away.
The service was followed by a sit-down dinner and dance in a large venue which had been completed the day of the wedding. People dressed in their finest ate, drank and danced to a live band until 5 a.m.
Before the wedding, the town sprinkled the dirt road from the bride’s home to the church with water so the bride’s gown wouldn’t get dusty.