This morning I woke up, for some reason, at 8.
In Guatemala there is a thing called Madrugada. It means the hour you wake up in the morning. We don’t have a word for this in the US because everyone wakes up at different times but culturally, Guatemala wakes up early. “Oh well that’s because they have a siesta.” Wrong. Guatemalans work from sun-up to sun-down and typically sun-down means TV for an hour or two, and then sleep. Unless you’re Abuelita and then you’re in bed by 7. But still, at 93 the woman gets up before 6 and doesn’t nap all day!
But I don’t madrugar. I just get up whenever life dictates. And if life well, doesn’t dictate, then I enjoy the sleep. I. love. sleep. I’m not good at falling asleep early but I can sleep in like a college freshman dorm. But this morning I was up at 8 and prepared to make my coffee, but hadn’t yet brushed my teeth and clean my retainers (sexy, I know) when my Host Mom called for help. I had already been downstairs to help her left the flowers onto her shoulders, but apparently she didn’t tie them well enough so they fell on her way to the market and she had to abandon them in the street and come back to the house for a basket.
Here’s a thing you must know about Pascuas. They are Poinsettias, in English, but they grow like huge STALKS maybe 15 feet high. They don’t grow the fat leaves like in the US (where everything is wider) but they are just as red as the flower. Well, my host Mom grows them in her different terrains and sells them during Christmastime. Yesterday I went with her to cut a bunch (correction: watch her cut a bunch) and help carry some home. I took a montón of pictures, even some instant polaroids, and Boomerangs and more pictures. There’s no way to accurately capture the brilliant red of these flowers that kiss the mountainside, but they bloom just in time for Christmas every year.
Yesterday afternoon when we got home, Doña Chayo (that’s my host mom) still had to sort the flowers, cut the stems evenly and then she rips a small piece of a hard, green stem from a separate plant and ties it around the flowers like earth’s ribbon and then… she cooks them. Yes, stalk and all, she puts the flowers in a cauldron, and the flower stems, like… warm up like they’re in a sauna (jealous). She explained this to me my first Christmas here: the sap in the flowers, thick and white like milk but also the type that stains your clothes and you can’t easily wash out (I’ve lived this now), is steamed out by the sauna situation. So she sets up a fire in our outdoor kitchen and puts the cauldron over it and cooks the plants. Then she sprinkles cold water over the tops of the flowers so that they spring back up to life. She says this “sets” the petals and the flowers live much longer.
The flowers have already been arranged in bunches, ‘manojos,’ with the thick ribbon around each and sells for either Q5 or Q7 each (I think 7 is what she offers and 5 is what they pay- barter lyfe).
So All Of That Back-Story was to explain that I ended up bra-less and still in my pajamas, carrying a pack of ungainly poinsettias in my arm, wrapped in plastic to mediate the stem-staining on clothes, with my coffee at home steeping while I followed Doña Chayo to the neighboring town to help set her up in the market place. I know the last thing she wanted was for anyone to see me walking with her, US American Means Money, especially to help her sell her things in the morning (maybe people would pay less). So I didn’t linger and she didn’t chit-chat, with one simple: “gracias oye” I was walking back home, bra-less with my highlighter “30” pajama shirt on from my 30th birthday, my sleep pants, no sunscreen, the true definition of “Pazapik A Wi” (messed up head) de regreso a la casa.
I loved it. I felt both helpful and unlazy and I love the reactions townsfolk have when I am doing normal things like carrying flowers, like everyone else here. They can’t believe it, they laugh, they stare, they yell K’iche’ at me and I say “Jeee.”
But it was a little hard to watch my host mom hustle all day like that. She is 66, and all she wished for over her birthday candles last October (even though I told her NOT to say her wish out loud) was to live another year, healthy. She didn’t ask for retirement or social security or her ex-husband to come back and help her out with the firewood heave every day. And because my host sister is in the capital selling avocados, the only person to help was me. She had to run from one gig to the next and after I offered to pick-up dinner for her, she didn’t sit down and until 8:30 (we normally eat 2 hours before because we are on Abuelita’s schedule).
That run to Santa María was just the beginning of her day. After she sold her flowers in the market, she had to go drop off some orders with her nephew and her sister. Then she came home, quickly ate lunch, went back to the land where her flowers grow, cut more and asked me to meet her there. I couldn’t help her actually cut them because A: I don’t own a machete and B: I don’t know how to do it (as she accurately reminds me). “It” means machete, mostly, but other things to. And don’t forget that I am a source of income; how quick would you be to hand a source of income a machete?
So then after 2 hours of me squatting on the side of the hill basking in the gorgeousness of this December day in Santa Clara, listening to my host mom chop down huge stalks and later brush off the base leaves with the edge of the blade and a lifetime of muscle memory, I was able to help her tie up one huge bunch of poinsettias and lift them on her her back via mecapal (a forehead strap) and carry the significantly smaller bunch in my arms all the way home. We walked up one hill, down another, through a short cut, half-way up one hill and took a right then a left until we got home and walked in to see Abuelita saying “Dios Mío” at the vision of me carrying flowers in my arms. “Carrying flowers” does not accurately depict what’s going on here, that makes it sound like we were picking daisies. These were huge, cumbersome stalks and if we smashed the flower petals then all other hard work was wasted.
At one point I whined: “Why can’t we pay a tuk-tuk?” (the richshaws that zip by) and she said: “Ay Dios Natalia, peor todavía, eso solo arruina más a las flores.” And I said: “we couldn’t tie them up top?” and she said: “Ay Dios, peor todavííía….” and she is not wrong. Sometimes (oftentimes) the best way to get something done is to do it with your own brain and two feet. But I am from the USA and we like to use machines instead of brains and machines instead of feet. We like to use machines for almost all of our needs. I didn’t realize how strongly this was imbedded in my very fiber until I lived in a place where my host mom carried firewood on her back via a head strap every day for heat and for cooking, and until I was carrying huge flowers up the edge of a mountain in my arms.
My favorite thing about this whole day is that when people carry flowers strapped to their backs or foreheads or whatever, it looks like the flowers are growing up from their spines. It’s so beautiful. I know for them it is uncomfortable and heavy, but I get to see it from a distance. And it’s just stunning. When she has just strapped the flowers to her head/back, and she has to lean over to get her machete and her other tools, it looks like she is the base of this gorgeous plant and I am struck by it’s immense, towering beauty. The flowers bloom from her and through and above her and I’ve never, in my life, seen anything else like it.
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We ate dinner together, finally when she sat down, and she told me the story of a woman in Santa Clara who was a black-out drunk for two years. My host mom, with her sister, decided that they would pay someone for a ‘secreto.” She means a spell. So she paid a brujo in Santiago Atitlán to cure this woman and from that day forward the woman stopped drinking. I asked “Did the death of your sister cause this person to start drinking so much?” and she said “No, my sister was still alive for this period…” And then she told me that a woman in Santa María at the market this morning asked her: “How is your sister? I haven’t seen her….” And my host mom had to say: “She is dead. She died five years ago.” You see, my host mom doesn’t much go to Santa María except for a specific transaction like selling these flowers or picking up avocadoes. Her life is in Santa Clara, and her sister is buried in Santa Clara, too. And when this woman asked her about her sister, my host mom said she cried in her front of her. She cried for her sister. Part of the land where we were cutting the pascuas today belonged to Chayo. Because, for whatever reason, they were both named Rosario and called Chayo in K’iche’.
And then she cried to me, too. I watched the tears from her left eye find a path between her nose and the defined wrinkle under her eye.
My host mom has lived some really difficult things. But the only thing I’ve ever seen her cry about is her sister. She cried about me leaving for Early In-Service Training, but I think it reminded her of her sister being gone. And she cried when I nearly broke my ankle, but I think it was from her sister being gone, too. I think it all reminded her of her sister. And I wish it hurt a little less.
But she goes every week or at least every month to the land her sister left, and she works it alone. And before Christmas she cuts the pascuas and carries them home on her head. And that was today’s hi-lo.