My grandma braid my hair
My grandma braid my hair and had the patience for it that my mama couldn’t find among all her emotional turmoil. I was crying pretty much every time my hair was about to be touched, I dreaded the moment. I had abundant, very curly, and long hair. It was jokingly referred to around the house as the “lion mane”. Everyone had curly hair at my home, my mom’s was really thin and easier to comb, my grandma she would know how to handle her very curly and very short hair. My aunt was always on braids when I was a child. My grandma would detangle, hot comb or braid my hair every Sunday night in the kitchen. Those moments felt conflicted because she will be silent and patient and I will be trying to talk among the auchs and the be careful, grandma that hurts. These were our moments of connection.
My grandma will spin the hens head until they were almost dead, will take the water almost boiling, tell me to move, not gently but never with disdain either, clean the hen, cook it, and give me the first soup of the sauce because it has good nutrients. She will raise the hens and look for the corn to raise them.
My grandma knows many things. She is the smartest woman I know without any fancy degrees or diplomas to certify her prescriptions to our maladies, her calculations of the margins of the many salesman activities that she and the rest of the family did.
My grandma is a businesswoman who didn’t have the opportunity to become bigger. We had a neighbor selling garlic and distributing it and my grandma noticed through our common fence that he was throwing some residue of the garlic, which for him was nothing he was trading in tons. She asked him to get the bags for free, she will effectively be helping him dispose of them. He agreed. And then she will clean it, and get the loose garlic cloves, put them in small containers of about a cup’s size and sell it in the street for those that could not afford or didn’t want to buy a whole string of garlic that was prohibitively priced for most of the neighbors in the city at the time, going on to sell it herself before going to work, yelling in the streets “Garlic, garlic” and adding some witty line to make sure to get the attention of people in their houses. A few weeks into it, all the family was in the backyard threading garlic cloves and agreeing on what neighborhoods to go to that day to sell their garlic. I grew up seeing them boil corn to sell at the carnival parties, buying cheap needles and thread razors and resell them on the streets, in our hometown Central Park when my grandma retired. I watched my grandma make sweets for us when going on a vacation to a camping site where she also had to cook, and we couldn’t afford to buy stuff there, but those are the best candies I have had. My grandma is the only woman of her 7 siblings and the only one to not complete a college degree. I believe that’s a consequence of the times, of the times she has had to live.
I called my Grandma’s house, the house I grew up in, the church. She will open the door before the sun comes up completely, and she will throw water at the dusty street, the street that lost the asphalt by so many reparations by phone and water companies that will crack it open and never really put it back together again. Each day started with her going around the house, cleaning, singing her religious songs, opening doors and windows, putting coffee, and putting on the radio. And then people will start to come in. My uncle before going to work will stop by, the neighbor to recount her later misfortunes, one of her sisters-in-law for coffee and a few words before heading to work, my grandpa, mom, all of this and still was not 7 am. As a kid was one of the most annoying things to have in the mornings, noise waking you up, but with time you recognize the community my grandma created for herself and how important she is in that community and that all of that gives her meaning.
The house was narrow but relatively large with a long corridor to the left and the rooms to the right until one hits the kitchen with the table, the water tank, and the stove. I never heard my grandma complain about anything in that kitchen. She calls it her department. Sometimes there was no food, no combustible to cook, they had to cook outside with a coal burner, the smoke clouding her glaucoma-filled eyes. Sweat from the heat and humidity of the unforgiving tropic island weather coming down her face, never a complaint, never a word of how we don’t deserve these circumstances or this is not fair. Never. She will be kept to herself a lot, so maybe on the inside she was cursing her gods, but I never heard it.
Grandma used to work for most of my childhood at a place selling sugar cane juice. If you haven’t tried it on a hot, humid day on an island, you should try it, on the rocks. Her cafeteria was in a popular T corner in the city leading one way to the hospital, one way to the outside to the city, and one way downtown, that’s to say they’ll sell a lot and she will spend almost the whole day standing, serving the sugar cane juice, making very quick calculations to give change and cleaning the place that will get sticky like a candy chewed by a toddler every two seconds. Each afternoon she will come home with a sweet treat for us and a bottle of sugar cane juice that everyone will fight for except me because in my infinite arrogance I didn’t like it. Her best friend there was one of her best friends, several years younger but a happy woman that as my grandma never miss a day of work, and always will serve with a smile and will know almost all clients coming in more than once. I use to stand waiting for my grandma to finish thinking about how I could never talk so much during a day. I was painfully shy but very talkative with those I deemed worthy, my grandma one of the few.
Grandma told me once that she had a kid whom she named but didn’t make it past a few days. She casually mention it one day I was back in town from college in a conversation that I don’t think was about children you have lost that we have never talked about. Grandma keeps her business to herself.
My aunt was in Atlanta 96’ for her first Olympics, we didn’t have coverage on TV for Paralympic Games, you heard the summary of what happened yesterday in the evening news. It was agonizing to Grandma, I think she was praying but she never said anything, she did the same things she will do each night, grab a chair from the dining room, bring it to the living room, open the door to let the air in and seat in the front with her two siblings and sisters-in-law and most days me. I only noticed she shush me and then said to my grandpa that seemed to hear what she was thinking how will be Liudys doing? To then see her jumping through the roof, not really understanding how her arthritis-filled bones allowed her to when we heard my aunt got not one, but 3 golden medals. This has to be one of the moments I have seen my grandma the happiest. Her child with meek body composition, not at all looking like a competitor in throwing sports, and probably overlooked by her rivals have overcome them all in 3 disciplines. I don’t know what that feels but I know what I felt seeing my grandma jump up to the floor.
Grandma's cooking is obviously, indisputably the best in the whole world. Her sweets sometimes wouldn’t be sweet at all because she will say too much sugar is bad for you but really we didn’t have enough rations of sugar for the month so she will reduce what she will put in all the preparations so it will last most days of the month. This came to be a “feature” that the family will constantly vary between reprehending and praising her for depending on the day in the calendar. Grandma didn’t care about opinions others had about her cooking, her sweets sweetness, how she dresses, her saints that she will bow to every morning, or anything really.
She was at all times unapologetically her, there’s nothing to figure out, uncover or reveal, she was just her at all times. I came to be extremely doubtful and hesitant to the most mundane tasks, a trade that I don’t think I got from her at all. Grandma never says sorry about how she is, never feels pity, and never speaks a word wrong about herself or others. If she makes a mistake, she swiftly moves on. She has the strongest sense of what’s important that I know of. At least what’s important for her. Her family, her siblings, her community, and enjoying life. And she will put all of those things before anything else in her life.
I keep telling one American I know that what we consider good food is deeply rooted in the experiences we have had with that food, all the things around the food, and the emotional ties that we create around them because if I describe the food to you or give you to test it, you might not see the big thing about it but to me is a whole rollercoaster of memories and grammy love. Grandma will make rice milk every Sunday night for dinner. We will have a hearty lunch early in the afternoon and then around 5 she will put the rice on. Each of us will get a plate of rice milk with cinnamon as garnish. Each Sunday night without fail.
When Grandpa died something was left for Grandma too. She joked to my very concerned face for her that she will live to see my children, her great grandchildren. I keep telling her that the fact I have to have them is for the sole purpose of extending her life. My grandma is not afraid of anything except of something happening to her family. She will run to the hospital with me, for me and for my cousins and my mom and my aunt and my uncle and her siblings and their wives. She is a fighter and a believer in life. But grandma is not a pollyannish, she talks about death as a vital component of life all the time and the saying she has repeated to us constantly is you only need to be alive to die. She has told me how she wants her funeral to go and the flowers she rather would have now than in her grave. As such grandma lives intensely and to my question, if she ever gets tired of still going around the house, cleaning, cooking, and doing errands she says all the time but I can rest when I’m dead. I think that’s why she keeps living on so graciously.