Mi Amiga

She wears red fingernail polish and hot pink lipstick, gold rings on her fingers (and possibly bells on her toes); but she is not gaudy, only vibrantly alive. Her red brick cottage overflows with radiant flowers; the fuschia bougainvillea which came with her from Mexico is most like her, and I think it’s secretly her favorite.

[we interrupt this blog post for a moment of poetry:

"Till she gave me, with pride to make no slip,
Its soft meandering Spanish name.
What a name! Was it love, or praise?
Speech half asleep, or song half-awake?
I must learn Spanish one of these days,
If only for that slow, sweet name’s sake."]

She has a lovely lilting Spanish name and a lovely lilting Spanish accent to go with it; sometimes I catch myself listening to her voice instead of what she is saying. She tells me about growing up in Guadalajara, heaven on earth, the city of fountains and roses; not too many people, like in OKC, or too few, like the gasping little town she’s in now, but perfect. Her family was well-off, but her father insisted she learn to sew, and go to cooking school. "Why?" she asked. "The maid can do that." "Yes," her father answered, "but you will need to know how to do these things if you marry a poor man, and how to order it done if you marry a rich man."

She married a poor man from here when she was 18, because all her friends were getting married and she didn’t want to be an old maid. "Tell me you aren’t even thinking about getting married yet, hahnee," she turns to me seriously. "You have plenty of time."

["Roses, if I live and do well,
I may bring her one of these days
To fix you fast with as fine a spell,
Fit you each with his Spanish phrase…"

We interrupt this poetry with your regularly scheduled post. Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s rude to interrupt?]

When she crossed the border, the patrolman asked her why she had picked the worst state in the union to live in. "Don’t you know there are wild Indians there? They’ll shoot you with their bows’n’arrows and scalp you." "Is that true?" she whispered to her new brother-in-law.

["But do not detain me now,
For she lingers
There, like sunshine over the ground..."]

It was November when she came, and there was snow on the ground. The only shoes she had were sandals. She cried in her pillow every night.

["Is there no method to tell her in Spanish
June's twice June since she breathed it with me?"]

She worries that she’ll be cranky when she gets old (she’s only 70 now), because she’s always liked to be independent. But I know she’s sweet. She can’t go back to Mexico now, because she takes care of her ex-husband. He’s at their son’s for a couple of weeks so she can go to the doctor, and the cat she bought him tries to sleep in her bed, but she won’t let it. She doesn’t want it getting attached to her, so he can feel like it’s his very own. She speaks well of her daughter-in-law, and buys a chocolate malt for her dentist.

["Roses, you are not so fair after all."
~Robert Browning, from "The Flower's Name"]