I shouted, “Come on, let’s go. I want to see the animals.” I fell because I was in a hurry and the ground was still wet.
Claudia looked at me and said, “You are not from here.” I saw her running with no problem on the same wet ground. We got in the house, and there were only pigs and chickens prowling around. I saw old wood laying on the floor, a crooked table and a lot of dust. This is where my mother was born. She used to sleep and eat in here. A sense of belonging filled me.
We got out of the house and I started to see other crops, not only corn, but yams, sugar cane, papaya and mango trees. It was like a garden, but instead of flowers, there were fruits, vegetables, and animals, such as donkeys and cows. We walked by more houses and we stopped to greet people. We ate, we drank and we talked to them. From these quick stops I started to learn more about this place and my family.
Suddenly, it started to rain and we had to go home. Running through the wet corn crops, I fell again. Claudia burst out laughing, but I did not get mad. My Aunt Antonia, Arlinda’s mother, greeted me with a hug and a dry towel and said, “I have been waiting for you two.”
Antonia told me so many things about this place. One of the things was that my mother’s great-grandparents bought the village in the beginning of the 1900s for about $10. She even showed me the receipt which was put in a little plastic bag so it would not fall apart. Only relatives live there, making all the people I met related to me somehow. The sad thing about it is that a lot of people are moving to the city because it is hard to live in the village now that everything is more industrialized.
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