Hilcias’ abuela’s name was Izote.
The Izote is the national flower of El Salvador.
It is beautiful, with thick, pointed leaves.
It is a stubborn flower full of the will to live.
It is born again and again out of it’s injured trunk.
In a way, his abuela was like the Izote.
She was beautiful.
She was full of life.
She was born again and again out of the wound of El Salvador’s civil war.
In another way, she was not.
She died.
A masked gunman shot and killed her, all because a neighboring shop keeper was murdered and she might have seen the shooter.
She didn’t.
But it didn’t matter.
There is no sense in violence, only the nonsense of the loss of a life who could have made the world a better place for all of us.
Hilcias never met his abuela.
He knew her, though, from the stories his mamí and abuelo told about her.
When he was a baby, 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 his mamí’s shoulders, and the beat of her heart as she worked
and talked about his abuela.
When he was a toddler, he noticed the dirt and blisters on her feet as she walked on and on, bending and picking, picking and bending, until the sun set on the horizon, and learned that his abuela had those kind of feet, knew that kind of work.
His mamí sang songs about his abuela, and he learned them.
He came to know her through his mamí’s heart, feet and music.
His abuelo sat beside his sleeping mat at 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 you could see.
They stretched all the way to the river that was a blue and crisp as the morning sky.
We were so happy there.
The land was ours to nurture.
The corn, beans, mangoes and chickens were ours to eat and sell and store away for the dry season.
Your abuela was so beautiful standing in those fields.
I would look at her, and my heart would beat as fast as a humingbird’s heart because of her beauty, and my eyes would drop tears of thankfulness for her love.
She was the field.
She was the mountain.
She was the river.
She was the hummingbird.
She was the Izote.”
He came to know her through his abuelo’s stories and love.
- Trevor Scott Barton, “stories for a brown eyed girl,” 2020
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