Friday, July 28, 2006

Early Influences
I am five or six and I am living with my mother's mother, my grandmother.
She has long gray gold Indian hair that falls down her back.
She sits in front of the mirror and brushes her hair.
Her braids are long and she rolls them up into a bun, where they stay with pins.
She speaks only Spanish; she opens the watchtower and shows me the garden.
The utopia where I see the pictures of the lions and the lambs living together in the garden.
She and I travel by train from Pasadena into Los Angeles to see relatives and go to her revivals.
They speak only Spanish at these revivals; there are only tents, tents and more tents.
I can travel about freely I am looking into large tents, it reminds me of a circus,
I know nothing of what is going on, they are speaking in Spanish.
My grandmother is comfortable to be around.
She is a peaceful woman, she is my ideal, and I sit and watch as she brushes her long hair,
she has influenced my life, and she speaks only Spanish.
I spoke only English because that is what I was taught to speak, everyone in this
household spoke only English to me except my grandmother, and she only spoke Spanish.
These are early memories of the garden this is a nice place to be.

3 comments:

Sandy Hatcher-Wallace said...

You know, I don't have too many recollections of my grandmother in San Gabriel other than she cooked all the time and accompanied me to my first week of kindergarten.

Alipurr said...

this is a very nice memory to have

Anonymous said...

This is wonderful. You bring me right there. I can picture it.