My great-grandmother, the woman who raised my mother, never learned to read or write. Although this is not a secret in our family, the thought of it surprises me one morning, enough that I have to text my mother to confirm.
Reading and writing have been joy and refuge for as long as I can remember. I make my living, in a way, by reading and writing. For many years, my mother made hers teaching hundreds of children to read and write. She says that I am a reader because of all the books she read while pregnant with me, twenty-five years old and by the height of that summer, feet so swollen she couldn’t wear shoes. I like that she was reading novels and not parenting books or children’s books. I think it’s key that she read for herself and not a baby.
My sisters are avid readers and talented writers, and I think my niece will be too, but maybe she will be more of a soccer player or a civil engineer or a veterinarian or a gardener, and I can think of nothing better than whatever she wants to be.
I think about my mother and her sisters, cousins, tías, their syncopated tones rising, dropping, pitching deep, emotive, then trilling, high, insistent, over pots of beans and rice; kitchen sounds shimmering with the sizzle of plátanos verdes which, by the end of the story, will have been transformed into a mountain of salty tostones.
My family are storytellers. We want to regale, set the scene, lead you to the climax, nail the denouement. And we love to be told stories. We want to laugh, be astounded, be moved. You don’t need to know how to read or write to understand and teach and learn and know storytelling. But — how grateful I am to have those keys to the city of unending stories, to the power to tell and remember in as many ways as light refracts.
I wonder what kind of books my great-grandmother would have liked to read. I think probably the Bible, but maybe a romance.
Love the title and finding where this sat within the post. Lovely, as always.
Loved this!!!!