fragments

“Remember, mi nieto, I’m a farmer, not a barber.”

Little Salt looked into his abuelo’s eyes. 

“They are farmer’s eyes,” he thought. 

“Brown like a field that has just been turned by donkey and plow. 

Heavy lidded from years and years of looking for one more peach in a tree and one more tomato on a vine. 

Kind because he is a migrant worker and has learned to look into the faces of other people and see all that is human inside of them.”

He looked at himself in a small, cracked mirror in his abuelo’s big, cracked hands.

His dark hair was cut in a crooked line across his forehead.

There were uneven gaps above his floppy ears. 

His own brown eyes sparkled like the light of stars off a river of deep water in the middle of an El Salvadoran night.

“Yep, you’re definitely not a barber,” he smiled.

Since he could remember, he had traveled from state to state and farm to farm with his abuelo and mamí. 

When he was a baby, he rode on his mamí’s back, tied with threadbare pieces of cloth, as she climbed ladders and reached up into the sky with her hands to pick peaches, and as she kneeled and reached down to the earth with her hands to pick tomatoes from vines on Johns Island.

He traveled the migratory roads.

His family worked the land.

They lived in trailers and shacks with holes in the floors, cracks in the walls, and leaks in the roofs.

They lived in old, hollowed out school buses.

They lived in places broken apart from years and years of families moving out and families moving in.

Of owners using money for things other than repairs.

Yet held together by people like his abuelo and mamí, who moved into new places, scrubbed the floors and walls with soap and water, repaired the broken parts with the things they carried with them, and patched things up with a mixture of grit, common sense and love.