Translated by Marvin Najarro
Since four o’clock in the morning, she has been at the pond washing her family’s clothes, some other women arrived at three o’clock, each one with a kerosene lamp to provide light in the darkness of the village’s grove of trees. Fortunately, there is a pavilion that provides cover from the rain when it is not windy, but when it rains heavily there is nowhere to take shelter, and they wash the clothes under the heavy downpour and end up soaked with their clothes dripping as they walk back home.
If they finish before sunrise, they take the opportunity to bathe, lathering up with jabón de coche or aceeituno, which they carry wrapped in a corn husk, and of course la piedra poma (pumice stone) to scrub their carcañales (heels). But they cannot do this if the sun is up, because the pond is next to the pathway, and by six o’clock in the morning it is busy with cows, goats, children and teenagers who herd them. There are also men and women who are going to take the bus to the capital.
At six in the morning, Lupita has to go home to organize the sale of the day, she has to curdle the milk to make cheese, go to the garden to cut flowers and sprigsof velo de novia. She wraps the hen eggs collected the previous afternoon in corn husks, one by one, so that they won’t break. She cuts the güisquiles vines and ties them into small bundles, along with sprigs of chipilin and hierba mora, honey, and bundles of ocote. She arranges everything in a basket and prepares her yagual.
She starts to knead the cheese, and since she also sells the whey, she puts it in one-pound plastic bags. She wraps the small balls of cheese in banana leaves and arranges them in the basket. Hurriedly she drinks a cup of café de maíz and eats a tortilla with salt. She ties on her apron, her mother persigna the sale with rue sprigs, and then she leaves for the newly built neighborhood, situated on what used to be Finca Los Cipreses to sell her goods.
Lupita remembers the leafy trees and the tall grass that used to be on the farm. With sadness, she observes how the urbanization caused the erosion of the soil, clouds of dust and mud, and how small plots of land are sold to people at exorbitant prices.
In half an hour she sells everything, and with the money she made, she goes to the market to buy half a bottle of cooking oil, a pound each of salt and sugar, batteries for the radio, and a quetzal worth of cardamom candies, which she takes to her five siblings waiting for her at home, and whom she looks after as if they were the apple of her eyes.
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Ilka Oliva-Corado