#32 - My Aunt Olivia

It’s early morning, the cows have been milked, and beds have been made. Now, rosy-cheeked, my Aunt Olivia reigns from her small, dark, windowless kitchen. My cousin Cuca has returned from the mill where she took the corn or nixtamal to be made into masa, dough for the corn tortillas her mother will now make.

In the mud oven or fogón the firewood heats the round griddle, and it’s ready to receive the thin discs of uncooked masa where they will become tortillas, round and light, like magical globes lifted by hot air. Silently, one of my six cousins feeds the firewood so his mother can begin. The wood tortilla-press is big and heavy. From behind the metate, her grinding stone, Tía Olivia, expertly throws the hot tortillas into a basket lined by an impeccable white napkin, impeccably embroidered by her or her daughter. It’s from this old woven basket that we take the tortillas and we spread on them the milk’s skin just recently boiled and we sprinkle it with salt. If it’s not with milk’s skin, we eat the tortillas with cheese or cottage cheese, or a spicy salsa just made in the rock mortar or molcajete.

My sister Irma loves her ranitas. A ranita is a tortilla freshly pulled from the griddle and onto which Tía Olivia throws a few grains of coarse salt and drops of water. She rolls the tortilla with damp hands and squeezes it a couple of times. Hungrily, hurriedly, Irma takes the damp and steaming ranita and bites into it with obvious pleasure.

It’s a delicious ceremony. Tía Olivia smiles and watches us eat the tortillas that bloom from her busy hands. There is not much talking. And sometimes, when she takes a break to puff at her cigarette, she watches us from behind the smoke she exhales with an intense, quiet look that we’re too young to understand or appreciate fully. Still—though at an unconscious, wordless level—we know ourselves to be before some type of archetypal goddess, a goddess of inexhaustible resources and strength. We witness the exact moment of her mystery—her ability to transform matter into nurturing food. Dressed in black, always wrapped in her shawl, in that dark room with dirt floor and mud walls, where she is illuminated by the fire, we watch her, mother and aunt, perform this sacred daily ritual.

Beyond the narrow door the day expands always blue and luminous. Somewhere in the distance dogs bark, the radio plays Mexican folk music and children laugh, calling us to play. But we choose to stay here, to pay her tribute. We choose to grow strong and healthy by the apparent simplicity of her everyday miracle.