this is what I remember about visiting my grandmother
Mourning doves calling at dawn, heralding the day ("morning doves," I thought, because that was when they sang). Yellow morning sun filtering in through a lace curtain. Shelves of ancient comic books, falling apart; handle them delicately, dear. A couch and carpet that smelled of dust. A painted cabinet which my cousin and I sat by while we sang along to my Raffi tape. A fishtank luminous in the dark; a realistic cork spider shadowy behind the curtains. A grand piano which I should not touch, piled with magazines. National Geographics, piles on dusty piles, showing me what the world was before I was born. The odd smell of the kitchen, tamales and mangoes, foods I ate nowhere else.
Green water in the irrigation ditch. Spiky dry grass under bare feet. Irrigation day; water warm and still around my ankles, the sound of splashing footsteps and the odd wavery feel of grass underwater. Bamboo in the backyard. Cool mud on hot skin. Frog eggs in the still fountain ("chiquita," said Alfonso, "chiquita."). Strange pottery in the courtyard. Uneven bricks beneath my feet. Mapping out the trail of ants that made a line around the kiln. Green light filtering through the tarp-roof over a table of small pots. Reaching for the gate latch, hearing it chunk closed behind me.
Crossing to Juarez, across the bridge with its guardhouse. Lunch in the restaurant, huge paper flowers overhead. The glassblower behind glass, magician's hands making delicate little things. A glass hummingbird, for me. Pottery and toys and figures. Scratchy colorful blankets. An adobe museum, white and cool inside. A marketplace inside a building, multiple stories of blaring music and bustling people and stalls and stalls of trinkets and foods and things for sale. Rosaries and santanas. Narrow streets, deeper than ours. A beaded scorpion pin to perch on my shoulder, a cheap little thing that I delighted in and lost that evening.
Alfonso, with big hands and a kind wrinkly face and no English. Alfonso's little apartment down the steps, small and cool and tidy, seen only once. Alfonso smiling, patient and tolerant, trying to teach me words in Spanish. Alfonso worried over my distress in losing my toy; a week later, rubber scorpions in the mail, not the same, certainly, but kind and thoughtful.
The clubhouse pool, large and empty in the baking sun, ivy on its walls. Boredom half-eased by cool water. Dinners in the restaurant on the top floor downtown, all dressed up. Jazz in the restaurant, people in suits and dresses. El Paso spread out and sparkling in the night. Clouds scudding across a summer-blue sky. Groceries with brands I didn't know. Walks along streets with no sidewalks; walking down the brick-walled street.
The house with the garden in the middle inside. A wall of masks, fascinating and frightening. A swing dangling from one rope out back. Dinner in the breakfast nook. Pecan pie.
Grandma, who smiled and wasn't yet ill. Grandma, who recognized me; Grandma, who I loved and who terrified me. I knew her as a child knows an adult: as a kind of god, incomprehensible and awe-inspiring. Adults have the secrets and make the world; children know that someday they will grow up and become adults, and look forward eagerly to knowing all the secrets, having all the privileges, but it is an abstract sort of knowledge. To a child, childhood goes on forever, sharply separate from the mysterious world of the adult.
I never knew my grandmother very well. I wish I could have known more.
Green water in the irrigation ditch. Spiky dry grass under bare feet. Irrigation day; water warm and still around my ankles, the sound of splashing footsteps and the odd wavery feel of grass underwater. Bamboo in the backyard. Cool mud on hot skin. Frog eggs in the still fountain ("chiquita," said Alfonso, "chiquita."). Strange pottery in the courtyard. Uneven bricks beneath my feet. Mapping out the trail of ants that made a line around the kiln. Green light filtering through the tarp-roof over a table of small pots. Reaching for the gate latch, hearing it chunk closed behind me.
Crossing to Juarez, across the bridge with its guardhouse. Lunch in the restaurant, huge paper flowers overhead. The glassblower behind glass, magician's hands making delicate little things. A glass hummingbird, for me. Pottery and toys and figures. Scratchy colorful blankets. An adobe museum, white and cool inside. A marketplace inside a building, multiple stories of blaring music and bustling people and stalls and stalls of trinkets and foods and things for sale. Rosaries and santanas. Narrow streets, deeper than ours. A beaded scorpion pin to perch on my shoulder, a cheap little thing that I delighted in and lost that evening.
Alfonso, with big hands and a kind wrinkly face and no English. Alfonso's little apartment down the steps, small and cool and tidy, seen only once. Alfonso smiling, patient and tolerant, trying to teach me words in Spanish. Alfonso worried over my distress in losing my toy; a week later, rubber scorpions in the mail, not the same, certainly, but kind and thoughtful.
The clubhouse pool, large and empty in the baking sun, ivy on its walls. Boredom half-eased by cool water. Dinners in the restaurant on the top floor downtown, all dressed up. Jazz in the restaurant, people in suits and dresses. El Paso spread out and sparkling in the night. Clouds scudding across a summer-blue sky. Groceries with brands I didn't know. Walks along streets with no sidewalks; walking down the brick-walled street.
The house with the garden in the middle inside. A wall of masks, fascinating and frightening. A swing dangling from one rope out back. Dinner in the breakfast nook. Pecan pie.
Grandma, who smiled and wasn't yet ill. Grandma, who recognized me; Grandma, who I loved and who terrified me. I knew her as a child knows an adult: as a kind of god, incomprehensible and awe-inspiring. Adults have the secrets and make the world; children know that someday they will grow up and become adults, and look forward eagerly to knowing all the secrets, having all the privileges, but it is an abstract sort of knowledge. To a child, childhood goes on forever, sharply separate from the mysterious world of the adult.
I never knew my grandmother very well. I wish I could have known more.