My Grandma had a Tapara Spoon
| by Carlos Casas |
Grandma
My grandma had a tapara spoon. For the anglo world, a spoon made with the fruit of the calabash tree. She used it to cook, to feed us, and to make her arguments stronger by waving it wildly. I haven’t seen her since I left Venezuela eight years ago. I think about her to make sure I don’t forget, to make sure she stays alive. Tapara spoons, unlabelled bottles of herbs soaked in rum, candlelit pictures of saints… There isn’t a day where I don’t look in the beautiful rearview mirror of my past, hoping that the objects are — or were — as magical as they appear.
Josefina is now a tiny 94 year old woman, but in my mind she is a tropical dryad. She writes her last pages surrounded by ducks and chickens, calla lilies and ever flowering chenilles, a backyard that at some unknown point stops being hers and crosses the border into the wild. And in grey, wet England, a grandson relives memories, hoping to learn from her quiet wisdom.
I was too young, too self-centred to listen. I watched football on the TV instead of helping her shuck corn, played on my Nokia 3120 while she tended the garden, and she never complained. Her capacity for love didn’t care about my attitude, and I find that beautiful. Like the gentle river that asks for nothing, gives all it has to give, and still makes it to the sea. Why not love like this?
Bare feet
When you’re a kid in Latin America, half of your health issues will be blamed on walking barefoot. Your elders say it will give you worms, scabies, generational curses. Yet she always moves on naked feet. She joins with the land like Bhudda touching the earth beneath, a constant Bhumisparsha Mudra.
I find it funny, the modern day struggle to renew our vows with nature, how we push ourselves away from it, but Josefina has never lost her literal landline. Her calloused soles defy our callous souls, her gentle walk leaves a trail of soft light behind. It tells me that everything can wait and nothing can’t be rushed.
When I say everything can wait, reality slaps me across the face: soon I won’t be able to see her anymore. Inside my golden cage of comfort, I surround myself with excuses to not visit. It’s too expensive to go back home. I have no time. I’ll lose so much work. It might not be safe. But being honest with you, I’m just scared.
I’m scared of going back to places and people that only exist in my memory. Scared of seeing in those ancient mirrors the person I was, standing in front of the person I’ve become.
Am I scared about not seeing Josefina again? Not really. The wind doesn’t die when it stops blowing. The tree is not dead when it sheds its leaves. In the blink of time we’ve been given, she is an endless force. In this garden of temporary delights, I picture her eternal.
I will always love her.
