I woke to the safe sounds of a gas burner igniting, a pan shifting, an egg sizzling. It was only then that a rooster started crowing somewhere in Colonia del Carmen. Perhaps he sets his clock by Carmela. I lingered in bed, until I heard 69-year-old Carmela and her 40-something daughter Patricia muttering in Spanish and figured it must be time to come out of hiding. I had no clear idea of the hour. My cell phone is my usual watch and I hadn’t brought it, unwilling to pay roaming charges in Mexico, or to risk having it stolen on the desperate streets of Juárez.

The pan dulce was a soft, airy, lightly sweet reminder of my L.A. childhood.

When I emerged it was 7:30 and Carmela was hanging laundry in the chilly morning shadows of the courtyard. Every day she washes dozens of towels and smocks for her son Diego’s hairdressing shop. She then made us a delicious herbal tea from canela (cinnamon) and flor de azahar (orange blossom).

“Good for calming the nerves,” she said, “para la tranquilidad.”

“I need that,” I teased. “I have an energetic personality.”

She smiled and offered her sincere hope that her tea would help.

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As Patricia and David had promised, their mother didn’t live far across the river from El Paso, Texas. After David drove through downtown Juárez, he spent five minutes winding through dark neighborhoods before turning into Carmela’s driveway. He unlocked a padlocked gate to pull into the courtyard. The gate had been there before Mexico’s drug war. Juárez has long known big-city, border-town dangers.

The inside looked bigger than the outside suggested. In the new addition, an old-fashioned wood stove warmed and cheered the room.

The house wasn’t small, though it might seem poor by American standards: a graying, peeling sprawl of cinderblock, brick, and adobe. “It’s too bad they can’t fix up the outside, isn’t it?” Patricia said. “No one wants anyone to know that they have anything and attract attention.” Juárez sees plenty of robberies these days.

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