My alarm went off at 7:17am. Already winning.

On my second morning in my new pueblo of Santa Clara, I descended the stairs to find my host mom in her tasked cooking pace, donning her delantal (apron) and tracing patterns on the cement floor. “Sientase, sientase.” Abuelita gets up to greet me as she prompts me to sit. She says something to her daughter, probably “Is her food ready? She is ready for her food. Does she have enough tortillas?” in K’iche.’ They’re always worrying about me eating. And sitting. Sitting and eating.

Today, we are going to cut coffee. I asked her on my first night there “Can I go?!” I heard her say she was going to “el monte” to cortar cafe and the bells clanged in my head: the birthplace of my favorite bean?! Not only to build confianza with my host mom, but to CUT COFFEE, I feel opportunity like a sticky sweat on my skin and it’s impossible to ignore. I must follow it! That’s not anything I’ve done before. I didn’t know what a coffee plant even looked like before I got here.

After we ate, and Doña Rosario told me a lot of the same things she told me the night before, “You need anything, you ask me. You ask me. The people in the street will charge you. They see you, they think you have plata.” (and she puts two fingers up to signify what I thought was a credit card but, now that I think about it, represents a wad of cash). Cualquier coooohsa, con confiaaaahnza.” she cooes in her usual chorus.

Guatemalan conversation in context is like a song: introduction verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus chorus. They repeat the same words I’ve heard from them before. I’m coming to find them a familiar comfort but I still can’t replicate it.

My second morning here, I cross the streets of my new town with my Host Mom. I’d say I’m walking next to her but I feel like I’m towering over her, peering down to meet her eyes. I keep wanting to measure my height up to the middle of my upper arm to confirm how tall she is. My guess is 4’8”, putting La Abuelita at 4’5”. Only Heaven knows their shoe size. I could probably buy them a house of shoes from the States because size 6 is always the cheapest on Amazon Prime.

We weave through a few streets until the right side of the road unpeels a green paradise. On the left, houses, on the right, a serene landscape of mountains, trees, houses perched within the beauty and the utmost defense of the nation’s tagline “Land of Eternal Spring.” We turn right and go down a smaller street, land on left, houses on right. And within one minute, we stop by a small drop-off boasting 10-15 foot trees. She greets a lady in K’iche’ and begins to work her magic on the land. This other lady is cutting cafe too, it’s not until later I learn that Doña Rosario has hired her.

Do-Ro proffers her lasso, sends it high over the top of a tree, wraps one end around the base of another tree, and coaxes the tall branches down. This is how we reach the coffee easily. I chuckle to myself  because she prompts me to pick the beans that are lower as she reaches for the beans that are higher. Did I mention our difference in height? But she wants to make the work easier for me. As she often says, “Mamita, Estoy acostumbraaaahda” as if to say: This is your adventure and this is my living. Don’t wear yourself out, my child.

Next, she tosses a small basket made of sugar cane onto the ground near me. She tells me to throw the beans in this basket.

And we begin to cut coffee.

I have three thoughts:

1- I’m not cutting coffee, I’m picking this red berry off green limbs. The colors make me think of Christmas and I tuck away the visual for Christmas day. Why do we call it cutting coffee? We aren’t using knives, just our fingers.

2- This is like meditation. Sure it’s repetitive and a little understimulating but working the land has an inherent medicinal quality. I use my hands to collect this red fruit that foams as I pick it, and in a few short hours we’ve got a big ole bag full of these red beans.

3- I feel like authentic. I wonder how many people swear by coffee but have never picked the fruit. And her I am doin’ it! And how cool is that! I feel like Howard Schultz’s emissary except better because Starbucks doesn’t pay a working wage, like fair trade coffee. (Word to the wise: fair trade betters the lives of the people I’m currently serving. Consider paying more for a fair price!)

Well I had more than three thoughts. My spirit was prized open by this soft and durable realization: I like my host mom, love my host mom, but most of all, I respect her. She is living a simple life out of necessity but she may not realize that it is a healthy simplicity, the type that feeds you. This is a type of life I don’t know. I know cars and cell phones and planners, moving fast and missing things like mountains and spiders and what it means to ‘work the land.’ Here we are perched on the edge of a precipice culling trees for red and yellow fruit that foam but maintain a durability when you pluck them from their source. The only sounds around us are life happening a short distance away, tuc tucs zooming by, the occasional rooster and the rhythmic cadence of honest work.

Before long a group of dudes walk by and stop to peer under the leaves. They want to see my face. “What is she doing?” seems to be the reaction. Before you know it, My host mom pipes up: “Hey, what are you looking at? You see her? You see how she’s working? You see how you’re not?” and their faces break into smiles. Her wide laugh bounces off the hill. My mom offers me Spanish subtitles after the moment, because she said all of this to them in K’iche’. DoRo is a B.A.B. and she is my host mom. In this one small and brassy gesture, it’s evident that she just gets it: what it means to be a host mom. And she’s never hosted anyone before!

Slowly we go, occasionally she comes over to check on my progress and see if I need relocating.
For as simple as it is, this job requires technique. I was tempted to put a bunch of beans in my palms and pull them off in clumps, but it doesn’t work as well as picking each bean one by one. The tips break open when you pull too many at once. Corporate greed, I think to myself, because my brain lives and dies by the metaphor.

By lunchtime we’ve consolidated our collection of beans into one costalito. I watch in silent amazement as DoRo loads up the giant bag of coffee beans onto her back and rests the weight of the bag on her forehead with a leather strap. I’m nonplussed. I’m amazed, overwhelmed, in awe. You pick (or you cut). Coffee joke. BUT I repeat: she is carrying a giant bag of coffee beans on her back by resting the weight on her forehead. And what’s more, she says “Con cuidado, despacio despacio” TO ME, the one carrying NEXT TO NOTHING and wearing APPROPRIATE FOOTWEAR (she wears plastic flats to the mountain, she prefers them over tenis she tells me). She’s going to sell the beans as is to a muchacha who lives in the house near el monte. We knock but she’s not home. So instead she leaves the costal in a house nearby and we walk home. She says she is going to return after lunch to work with the other lady cutting the beans. I opt to stay home after lunch. She laughs and understands, after all I am not acostumbraaaahda. But really I’m spoiled off my ass, I think that’s the direct translation of acostumbrada in this moment.

I did it. I cut coffee. I discovered the fountain of youth or at least energy on the side of a small mountain in my leggings and asics with a lady I hardly know who already looks out for me.

We got home and my hands were caked in grime, dark lines of dirt in the trails of my palms.
Funny, all the time we were on el monte I didn’t notice dirt at all.