#6 -- Letter to My California Home

Dear 411 Woodbridge Ave:

I just learned you were built in 1929 and that you offer 1225 square feet to your inhabitants. You’re a pretty humble home. My parents’ mortgage when you held us tight was only $65 dollars per month.

Let me tell you what you were in the seventies, when you were my home.

Because of their work in the orchards, our parents couldn’t pick us up at the airport that summer. So they told Irma and I to take a cab from the Sacramento airport to what we knew was our new home and of which knew absolutely nothing except this magical address written on a piece of paper to which we held on for dear life: 411 Woodbridge Ave. The drive to our town was an hour south of Sacramento.

Before you, we had lived in rental properties, all poor and probably undesirable for the majority of people, but to us they were the safest place ever, with mami and papi anchoring us strong and firm.

When we got out of the taxi and we saw the number 411 on a house that to our eyes looked like a mansion, we automatically walked down a small dirt road on your side that led to a place that to us seemed more appropriate (poorer) for us.

Finally we had to accept that the pretty house we saw initially was you, our home. We walked around you unbelieving and in awe. You had a fenced back yard and a side porch. I don’t know what my sister was seeing or thinking, but I remember I was unable to grasp that behind those creamy yellow, almost sheer curtains that covered the salient windows that framed the front of the house, was going to be where we would live. It seemed like a fairy tale home to the sisters who were not yet fifteen, and very probably developmentally much younger and innocent.

411 Woodbridge, you hold so much of my family’s history. Do you remember all the people that you housed, so many uncles and cousins for whom my parents open your doors wide and welcoming so they could work with us in the fields and orchards so they could send some money to their families back south? Do you remember my mother getting up at two or three in the morning so she could make flour tortillas for all those men? Do you remember her whitened hands, her sweaty face, and her roll pin as she turned the dough into flat round disks that bloomed with hot air, yummy and light on the griddle? Do you remember her plants, how, almost like green hallucinations, adorned your communal living spaces? Do you remember our friends the ones with whom we played cards until the morning came and they stayed to breakfast with us the “menudo” made by my mother?

How about my papi, 411 Woodbridge? Do you remember him, his laughter, his joking ways when he mopped your kitchen floor, his pepper and tomato plants in your back yard and that he watered in his silent peasant ways? Do you remember Sergio’s three children (Eva, Sergito and Adán) and how we cherished them?

Remember when finally one of your rooms became my bedroom? In that room I somehow had a desk and my room was uncluttered, everything in its place, beautified with the books I borrowed from the public library (I especially remember the poems written by a Hispanic New York cop turned poet).

You were filled to the brim, 411 Woodbridge, you were filled with the love that united us, the light that could not be contained by your yellow curtains; you were filled with our music, our laughter, our happiness, our birthdays, our language, our customs, our greenery, and my parents hunger to defeat the chronic and extreme poverty from whence they came. And through sheer hard work, dedication and devotion to their family they did. And, finally, you, 411 Woodbridge, made them homeowners in the United States.

Amidst the northern California scenery browned by hard working immigrants, like my mami and papi, oh 411 Woodbridge Ave, I’m so happy to know you’re still standing tall.