It was in Mom's nature to both love and to also be critical. Criticism was a way she wished her kids a better future. If you heed me you will do better. But when I heard her criticize her mother, Ventura, Mom seemed to blame the past for what she saw lacking in her mother.
Mom cared for her mother, for sure. There were gifts of baby chicks, food, shoes, and frequent visits with a 90-mile one-way trip to the town in Mexico where Nana lived, Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaulipas.
What was going on between this mother and daughter? All I could figure out as a kid was that they must have gone in different directions. Mom went on into modern times with her family and her life in Arizona and Texas, while Nana stayed in the 19th century when she was born. Her arranged marriage at the age of 13 took her from the tiny town of Parras where she lived with her family to Porcion 23, the ranch owned by her husband Matias and his two brothers, Eduardo and Espiririon Flores.
I hugged and loved my grandmother, but she was not a warm and fuzzy grandma. Kids have great BS detectors, and I could tell that she was honest, however different she was from what I imagined she should be. A telenovela grandmother. I remember watching telenovelas with my mom back home in Laredo and seeing the old Mexican actress Sara Garcia offering her family wise advice and consolation. Sara Garcia was the grandmother for all of Mexico in film and TV for several decades. Her face was so recognized it was displayed on boxes of chocolates and cookies. The movie grandmother with twinkling eyes and soft, round cheeks.
Ventura Molina Flores, who we called Nana, was nothing like Sara Garcia. Nana’s eyes were dimmed by cataracts from working in the fields planting and tending crops. She tended fires all of her days standing before the hearth cooking for her family and in later years making, cooking and selling tortillas. Sara Garcia's fictional grandmother loved to sit and chat. Nana was not a sitter or chatter. She moved all through the day in a steady manner with short steps and sturdy posture. You wouldn't want to get in between her and where she was going. When she wasn't selling tortillas from her kitchen window, she chopped wood, washed clothes, tended her garden, and looked after her chicken coop and the pig she raised to sell.
She loved us children but didn't show it by playing with us or interviewing us the way Art Linkletter did those kids who said the darndest things. We children had a place at her table with a plate and food upon it. We knew we had our place in her world because of who our parents were, but there was little curiosity about us after the obligatory hugs when we said hello or goodbye. The difference between Nana and the fictional grandma's on TV made me wonder if we grandchildren fit into her brain like some new chicks or a piglet to raise. She called me "la niña" instead of by my name.
Ventura Molina Flores, who we called Nana, was nothing like Sara Garcia. Nana’s eyes were dimmed by cataracts from working in the fields planting and tending crops. She tended fires all of her days standing before the hearth cooking for her family and in later years making, cooking and selling tortillas. Sara Garcia's fictional grandmother loved to sit and chat. Nana was not a sitter or chatter. She moved all through the day in a steady manner with short steps and sturdy posture. You wouldn't want to get in between her and where she was going. When she wasn't selling tortillas from her kitchen window, she chopped wood, washed clothes, tended her garden, and looked after her chicken coop and the pig she raised to sell.
She loved us children but didn't show it by playing with us or interviewing us the way Art Linkletter did those kids who said the darndest things. We children had a place at her table with a plate and food upon it. We knew we had our place in her world because of who our parents were, but there was little curiosity about us after the obligatory hugs when we said hello or goodbye. The difference between Nana and the fictional grandma's on TV made me wonder if we grandchildren fit into her brain like some new chicks or a piglet to raise. She called me "la niña" instead of by my name.
I found it interesting she didn’t go to church, but her old print of the Virgin of Guadalupe hung on her wall in a hand-carved wooden frame. It now hangs in my home.
As a kid I watched my mother talk about her mother with pity for her hard life. Now I wonder if the differences might have made Mom uncomfortable or even guilty. But Nana's life looked comfortable, secure and sane to me. She wasn't a big worrier. She seemed self-contained, content and never asking for or needing anything.
As I see Nana today, I think of her as deserving more credit than Mom gave her. She married as a child. She and her husband had nine children. She lived through the Revolution, the 1930's double-whammy of drought and depression, World War II where her son Adolfo served in the U.S. Army, the death of her husband and two of her children, the displacement of her town for the construction of the Falcon Dam. She lived too through the steady leaving or dying of each of her children and her husband.
Nana was clean and tidy in her appearance. She always wore black print dresses because she was a widow who continued to feel the loss of her husband. She wore flannel slip-on loafers with the flesh colored hose. She had long silver hair gathered in a bun. Here is my most clear memory. Nana always smelled of smoke from the fire she worked close beside in the kitchen.
I saw her angry a few times, but she generally had a steady temperament. While she wasn't playful or affectionate, she was kind and approachable. In her last year, she became lost in her world. She was acting strangely her neighbors told us so Mom and my aunt brought her to live in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. At our house she lived in the boy's bedroom while they were in college and the Navy. One night I watched as she stood in her nightgown and urinated on the linoleum floor. I saw she was busy talking to someone in the room with her. Her silver hair loose around her pale shoulders in such a contrast to her saddle leather brown arms and hands. Who is Nana talking with? She is conversing with people only she can see Mom told me. Who are they I asked? Mama said Nana was talking to her Papá and other relatives gone before. Gone to the same place she was now approaching. We cleaned up the urine and got her changed into fresh clothes. Nana soon gave up on eating and drinking and she died a few weeks later in the Nuevo Laredo hospital. She was buried in Nueva Ciudad Guerrero beside her husband’s bones that Mom and she had moved from Old Guerrero after the town was flooded and the waters had receded.
There were no secrets that my BS meter ever uncovered about Nana. No alcohol, no abuse, no dire circumstances or deceits. But I always wondered about her lack of outward affection, the sense of obligation instead of connection between mother and daughter. Maybe in Nana's world, you don't name your chickens and pigs for the same reason I was always "la niña". Nana's children all left to find their livelihoods far from home. Maybe something in you closes and locks after so many departures.
In my memory, my Nana still stands at the gate to welcome us and send us off again. She is solid and straight backed, seeing the flow of her family arrive and leave with the same calm equanimity. With or without us, she and her strong hands return to chores like chopping wood, feeding animals, watering plants and trees, making tortillas and cooking food on the hearth in the kitchen. In the evening she sits on the porch greeting passersby. A cool shower before bedtime. Next to her bed was a metal trunk that held important papers. A castaña where titles, birth and death certificates, identification papers were kept. I never looked inside of the castaña to see what Nana might have collected in a lifetime that she held private and contained as her emotions.
ReplyForward
|
No comments:
Post a Comment