She rose from the tattered mattress on the concrete floor in the room she rented beside the coastal highway.
People drove that highway every morning and every afternoon to get to the city and back to the countryside again.
They always looked toward the sea, because the sunrise and sunset over the ocean waters paints…well, how else can we describe it…beauty and wonder.
If they looked on the other side of the street, though, they would see a mother and daughter living in a concrete blocked, tin roofed house crumbling from weather and time.
“Wake up, mija,” said the mamí, and shook her daughter’s shoulder.
“We have to get ready. People ain’t gonna wait on their newspapers. They’ll just buy them from somebody down the road. We can’t lose the business.”
She knew newspapers were important to people. They connected them to each other, to their communities, to their country, and to their world.
“If the journalists who write the stories are brave and true, then the papers give life,” she thought many mornings standing by the road with a stack of newspapers in her hands waiting for the stoplight to turn red so she could offer the day’s news.
“Shhh, mamí!” said her daughter. “I can’t...”
Her words drifted away like steam from the coffee percolator plugged into the wall.
“Ah, my niña is my sonrisa,” thought the mamí as she saw the first light of the sun out her window on the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean.
“Mija! You’re my sol and you gotta rise! What happens if the sun don’t rise? Nothin’ for nobody. We gotta be somethin’ for somebody. We gotta get these papers to the main road. Rise up!”
The daughter lifted the sheet over her head to block out the morning light and noise, but the threadbare cloth was so thin it was as if nothing separated her from the sunlight and her mamí’s clinking and clanking about the room.
“Ugh! I give up. Can’t nobody get no rest around here.”
She slowly sat up cross legged on the mat and looked around the room with half opened eyes.
Her mamí wrapped her arms around her and kissed her lightly on both cheeks.
“Buenos dias, my sunshine. Have I told you lately how glad I am you’re my daughter? Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero.”
“Ugh,” groaned her daughter again, but this time she said it with playfulness in her voice.
She struggled to stand up, and her knees and ankles creaked and cracked as she rose to her feet.
A cool breeze blew from the ocean through the cracks around the windows and doors and brushed against the skin of her bare face, arms and legs.
This was the time of day she felt most vulnerable to life, standing in her t-shirt and panties against the world outside the delapidated walls and roof that had been weakened by the sound and fury of Hurricane Maria as it passed over the island some months earlier.
She opened her eyes a little wider, squared her bare feet and shoulders and raised her fist into a boxing stance against the day.
“Bring it!” she thought as she moved toward her mamí and the stack of newspapers.
No comments:
Post a Comment