When my mother, almost eighty, returns from Mexico, she usually arrives with a suitcase and two cardboard boxes. These boxes could very well have the logo of the Mexican detergent Ariel. She expertly ties these boxes with vinyl yellow rope, a typical sign that one must be Mexican (or maybe we could generalize and say Latin American).
I remember one particular trip. She arrived on a bus from Jiquilpan, a town near her native village in the state of Michoacan, to the Dallas suburb of Oak Cliff with a four-hour delay and swollen feet but, surprisingly, happy and strong.
After the vicissitudes that delays of this nature cause, we got home around midnight and brought in her cardboard boxes while she explains the delay and we call friends and relatives to inform them that she’s made it safe to Dallas.
As I help her with her boxes, time is somehow momentarily suspended. When she opens her boxes, yawns and tiredness magically disappear. She pulls out a lot of round cheeses, about 10, and jars of cajeta, a creamy caramel, and other sweets from her village, everything homemade, along with a very large plastic bag about to burst with dried red peppers. All this comes from Michoacán. Then come the bolillos or baguettes from Guadalajara and mugs for my new kitchen. She tells me sheepishly, “I wanted to bring you an entire set but one cost 1,800 pesos and another about 2,000 (roughly between 180 and 200 dollars). Can you believe it? So I just brought you these two mugs. They’re from Tonalá.”
It’s always like this when my aging mother returns from Mexico. Whether I like it or not, her boxes open the door to Mexico and my childhood: I can see the small village where my parents were born, the tile floor of my house, the streets of my barrio; I can smell the characteristic smog of my city, I can hear the deafening sound of the buses; I can peek at the steaming taco stand on the street corner. I remember some of the blurry faces of my many relatives.
With every cheese that I rinse for my mom (“to get rid of the excess drippings,” she tells me), I recover I-don’t-know-what essence that has become dusty and almost forgotten in my hectic everyday life in Dallas.
But the apex of my nostalgia, of its marvelous significance that is beyond words, occurs this time when she tells me that a woman reached her in Sahuayo to give her a pair of wings that my daughter had asked for as a birthday gift. I laugh when I explain to my husband that la Abuela could have made things easy on herself and just asked me to order them from the catalog where my daughter got the idea, instead of having to choose between bumblebee wings, or yellow, pink or white butterfly wings as she boards a bus, and then carry them tirelessly in her lap during the entire 27-hour trip that became longer because of two bus breakdowns in the middle of nowhere.
So that year my daughter got those Third World pink butterfly wings for her birthday.
From Mexico.
It seems to me that that is how it was meant to be.
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