55

She shared what she remembered with me a few weeks ago. The reception planned by the family, the food they served, the fact that her brother was not present at the wedding because someone had to guard their house at all times. The weather, the road, the types of fruit in season. Her ivory skirt and her best shoes and the run to meet her two friends that would stand witness. The groom was thirteen hundred miles away, waiting for her in the new country they would both call home. She was the lone bride on her wedding day. She shared the day and the celebration food with everyone around her but him. My Abuelita went before the judge and stood next to her future father-in-law and married my Abuelo by proxy.

She is telling me this story while we make croquettas together. We are rolling the ground, spiced ham into the proper form. Hands reaching into the large cast iron pot, scooping up the ham and repeating the long learned ritual passed between us, this generational rhythm, a synchronized history of food preparation. Our hands are the same hands really, I need only glance over to see what my hands will look like at age seventy. I am proud to have her hands. We roll and form, roll and form, she keeps telling me the stories.

The morning spent watching one final surgery at the village hospital, the hasty shower back in her dirt floor home, the tearful, heart wrenching goodbye to her mother. Abuela hopping on the bus from her village to Havana, traveling down the road to a city she has never seen. The following morning, February 9, 1956, she pulls on her traveling clothes and boards an airplane. Everything is foreign to her and there is a horrible storm that day. The plane shakes and she recalls the fear climbing up her throat and plummeting to her stomach again. She gives a small smile when she tells me that she was the last off the plane that day. That my Abuelo had stood there, anxiously waiting, wondering if something had happened or if she had changed her mind.

"What happened then?" I asked.

"He hugged me and handed me a large coat that he had brought for me. I've never felt so cold in all my life," she smiles again.

"Did he kiss you?" I need to know.

"Of course. He better have, I went all that way just for him."

"Were you very in love?"

She looks down at her hands, rolling and forming the croquettas, and her eyebrows lift slightly. She lets out a small sigh, "Oh, yes. We loved each other very much."

The heavy shuffle of feet comes down the hall, a slow drag of stubbornness, and he walks to the table and begins watching us as we work. He starts giving orders. Roll this way, form that way, use more breading. He turns and leaves again. Shoulders slumped, voice raised, arms seeking out great grandsons to hold.

"He taught me how to cook" she confides.

She had worked every day and never learned the most basic elements of cooking. That first meal in their new apartment had been a supper of rice and beans. He gagged and asked whether or not she was trying to kill him. She cried. He taught her how to cook.

He interrupts us several times, wanting us to do things his way. They begin to argue and I watch them. Wrinkled faces, work worn hands, once dark hair now shot through with white. I think of the miserable jobs they have held, the brutal sacrifices, the impossible mountains they moved to provide physical necessities for their children. The indelible mark they placed upon us by never once walking away from their Lord. I think of their entire lives pouring into one element that is us, our family, their children, their children's children, their children's children's children. The small bodies playing just one room away from their bickering. My children. My children who are watching television in a house with electricity, running water and a floor made of wood and not dirt.

I smile to think of what their love has built. They argue all the time. He is perfectly horrible to live with, and yet he is what holds it all together, he is the heartbeat and sinew and blood. He loves so fiercely, despite the brokenness and pain he came from, his hands cling tightly to the frays and he pulls them into himself.

They both grew up on that small island, the reality of third world poverty stained to their very core. They do not love extravagantly, with gifts and vacations and such. They love simply. To the depth and breadth of what they have, they give to each other. What are flowery poems and diamonds when one has known hunger and hard labor? There is no need for material surplus.

He is her anchor and she is his lodestar.

There is not a basic need unmet, they tend and provide and shelter. I have never seen one grab a piece of fruit without first offering half to the other. It is true love right down to the very last mango, even if they are both shouting at each other as they slice it.

We finish breading the corquettas and she wanders away from her stories, into the next room of her mind, something about prescriptions and a doctor's visit and warnings of mosquitos that bring encephalitis. We pack the food into bags and shoo the kids out of the house and into the cars. Everyone exchanges hugs and as we pull out of the driveway for our seven block drive home, they sit together on the porch wrapped up in fifty five years worth of marriage, watching the fruits of their labor and love drive away.

Happy Anniversary to my grandparents. 55 years together. I treasure every day that I have with you.