Memories I Keep (2)

A Field in San German

After I graduated college, my parents took me on a trip to Puerto Rico. For two weeks we’d bounce around the island, first with Mom’s family, then with Dad’s. The whole trip was a bit of sensory overload for me as it was the first time I’d been to Puerto Rico (I refuse to count the time I was there as an infant). I tried to keep track of as much of it as I could with my wholly inadequate disposable camera and sketchbook journal I took along, but I just couldn’t keep up, never mind that my first couple days there were a bit foggy as I was coming off a respiratory infection I picked up from my year-old niece.  

So, in those two weeks of crisscrossing the island, my most vivid memories of that time were of those places we went to for rest: the homestead where my mother grew up in San German, the cabin on the beach in Aguadilla, and Dad’s sister Marta’s place on a hilltop in a plantain orchard in Caguas.  

From the airport we rode to my aunt Maria’s place in San German. What made it special was that her house was built on the land that she and my mom grew up on as kids. It was their father’s land, passed to Maria. We had some downtime while aunt Maria cooked dinner. Dad and uncle Nicolas were conversing about the roads, relative inadequacy of current four-wheel drive vehicles, building materials, and whatever else crossed their line sight. I went about exploring, not wanting to be trapped in a slowly decaying orbit around their conversation. Mom found me standing in the tall grass, staring into a ravine at the far end of the property. Dad would no doubt have used the opportunity to launch into some dubious tale, reading any silence as an invitation to continue with another. But Mom was content to inhabit this quiet space, as I was to share it with her when so often quiet moments were a solitary endeavor. 

I could have stood there for hours, but the moment seemed particularly charged with significance. Throughout my childhood, Mom was everything that brought me comfort. The food, the bedtime tuck-ins, the food, the words of encouragement whispered in Spanish, and the food. She fulfilled these most basic of childhood needs and I asked no more from her. Until now, that is all I knew her to be and it was enough for me to love her fully. It just hadn’t occurred to either of us that the time was coming when she needed me. And here was a chance, perfectly set up for me. All I had to do was ask a question…but what? This ravine I had been staring into was the most present in my mind, so I asked her, “What’s down there?”  

As though I had stumbled upon the combination to a lock I never knew existed, Mom lifted her arms, brushed her hands across the tips of the tall grass, and told me about the river that used to flow at the bottom of the hill. She told me of its utility for a house with no internal plumbing and how she would follow the river when she walked to school. She reshaped the landscape, replacing Aunt Maria’s house with the tin roofed, wooden homestead of their youth, and the forest around the property with fields of sugarcane and a small clutch of almond trees. I see a little girl, running around with her brother and sisters, picking almonds off the ground. I can see her, boosted up by her brother to the lower branches, shaking them for their prize.  I was introduced to my mom again, or rather, I was introduced to Elia Pabon for the first time. 

Later in the day, uncle Nicolas took us over to a secluded, unmarked, and slightly overgrown plot of land outside of the San German town center. It was only revealed to me when we arrived that it was the cemetery where Mom’s father was buried. Mom wanted me to see his stone, among many similarly aging stones, and I was awed by the space. The cemetery was densely overgrown, not unkempt, just accepting of the forest’s will as greater than its own. And the area was small too. Very different from the wide-open cemeteries here on the mainland. The small, crudely hand carved stone, so small that his last name was cut off and finished on a second line, partially sunken into the ground offered a complete synopsis of the life of a man I had never met but was inherently tied to me. And in the shade of tall ferns and ceiba trees mom reached down and brushed the face of the tombstone, a gesture that declared a resolve so clear it crossed the gap of my ignorance. It would be another ten years before I would truly know the man this stone eulogized.