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Show The Hairt of My Mother Hairt is hunger, a longing for affection. The father of my mother was dying. My mother knew he was fading before anyone else from 233.8 miles away. She picked me up from school and we drove into the middle of the southwestern desert. I didn’t know what to expect. I was even younger than I was, the last time I saw him. That drive was unforgettable, later, when I understood the region. The home she was raised in rises above the empty landscape around it. From an aerial view, it is shaped like a goose. The bird’s head extends slightly backward, as if waiting to be fed. If not for the dirt roads wrapping around it and the cars parked besides the rock’s walls, the place would look one with nature. It would appear uncorrupted by my grandfather’s people, just another desert formation jutting from the dry clay earth. Before the rock was blasted through with dynamite and houses were built within its emptiness, there was only my mother and her parents. Before them, there was nothing. The area was empty, all but for a highway miles west and a forgotten history. In a National Geographic video about the desert that I watched as a child, there was a shot of the desert sky. Clouds ran freely in thin series and then disappeared on the edges of the horizon. Sometimes they swelled with rain, would release themselves, and then reveal a cloudless sky. The sun was shinning, beating and pounding on barren earth. My mother would leave the room when I watched the video. If I had questions, she would speak of Orion, the constellation she and her mother would trace on lonely, cloudless winter nights in that desert. My mother’s home, in the gone days, was similar to Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of the deforestation of his family’s ranch in Brazil- cracked earth, plant scraps, an unseen animal carcass nearby, a corner of a leaning shed, the presence of hot and unforgiving wind. That was how my mother’s home looked- rock hit by a tireless sun and emptiness. Yet, it was where my grandfather chose to bring his new family and his new, radical, beliefs. There, he thought his world was safe from ending and would only keep on growing. On that drive, my mother talked of my grandfather’s cancer, how the sun and the pigment of his skin had caused it. Had he gone to a real doctor years ago, he could have been saved. By the end, he could only eat cantaloupe. Stories of places here and there, she also told, many having to do with an underlying theme of starvation. Carrots were stored in the cold layers of the dirt floor for preservation. There were times of hunger and times of over eating the same thing for months. My grandfather worked to get enough food, leaving my mother to help raise her ten siblings. Her stomach was never full, though not until, maybe, when she had me. |
