from Trevor’ brain - novel in progress
“He came to know her through his mamí’s heart, his mamí’s feet and his mamí’s music.”
His abuela’s name was Izote. The izote is the national flower of El Salvador. It is white and fragrant, with thick pointed leaves. It is born again out of it’s own injured trunk...it never dies. It’s a stubborn flower full of a will to live.
His abuela was like the Izote. She was beautiful and stubborn. She had been born again and again out of the wound of El Salvador’s civil war.
Hilcias never saw his abuelo. He knew her, though, from the stories his abuelo and mamí told him about her along the migratory road.
His mamí wore him on her back with a tattered piece of cloth as she trudged the rows of tomatoes and peaches along the South Carolina coast.
He felt the heat that weighed on her shoulders.
He saw the dirt and blisters on her feet as she walked on and on, picking and bending, bending and picking, until the sun set on the horizon.
He listened to the songs she sang about his abuela.
He came to know her through his mamí’s heart, his mamí’s feet and his mamí’s music.
What a beautiful way to get to know another person.
His abuelo would sit beside his sleeping mat each night and tell him stories about El Salvador and his abuela.
“The land was beautiful,” he said, “With green fields on the mountain that stretched as far as your eyes could see. They stretched all the way to the river that was as blue and crisp as the morning sky.
We were happy there. The land was ours to use, the land was ours to nurture. The corn, the beans and the mangoes were ours to eat and sell and store away for the dry season.
Your abuela was so beautiful standing in those fields. I used to stop and stare at her, Hilcias, and my heart would beat as fast as a hummingbird’s heart for her beauty and my eyes would drop littlevtears of joy for her love.
She was the field.
She was the hummingbird.
She was the Izote.
She was beauty.
She was love.”
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