Tierra Colorada

I’m not entirely sure the reasoning behind but I hate telling people about Mexico. My Mexico. I do not protest to own the country or the culture but the soil and the sky are in my heart. And I do own my heart. So there it is. My Mexico.

I do have two theories. About why I don’t like telling people about my Mexico, that is.

1.     You’ll never understand it.

It’s not Cabo, Cancun, or Cartels. It’s not hostile, Mordor, Sodom or Gomorrah. The innocence would surprise you. It’s singing and dancing with your family on Friday Saturday and Sunday.

It’s the dirt and the sky. It’s the gentle roll of r’s and talking with your hands. The plants along the sidewalks sway to the rhythm of bongos and the clicks and clacks of horses on the pavement alleys through adobe houses. The wind barters through the open windows of chismes and bailes.

            2. I Just don’t want to let it be known. Criticized to be real. Because it’s my Narnia, my Hogwarts and the Disneyland that can’t be bought for rides. A town. A ranch, really. A two minute drive in any direction will allow you an escape from the dirt on the concrete, to the dirt on the dirt. And of the most magnificent kind.

Colorada: The Infamous

The red that stains and leeches to everything she touches. She brands you so that you may not be mistaken with the bourgeois. For once you’ve been marked, you can’t deny you’ve been into the depths the rancho.

She cools underneath the stars. She almost looks like a lady in the twinkling darkness. Her color softens, the scars she leaves, not as visible, and she lessens in ardor. The untampered ever glowing radiance. 

She seems lonely and almost desperate under this lighting. Chairs, blankets, and cars are used as a barrier between human and her. I don’t think she’d prefer it that way.  Because if you let her she’ll seep through and spread herself through the crevices and underneath the fingernails, and  “Wait, how did it get in my pockets?” Covering your materialistic thoughts and urges, covering those $80 shoes. Let me remember a time I didn’t care.

Let me forget the noise. All but the compositions of sounds coming from my family in foreground of the g’s and f’s of the worn guitar.
 The unknown past, as in really, no one knows our history. The conquistadores curiously misplaced documentation as people were ravaged and the less useful ones weed hacked to lay in the dirt.

But at least we have the dirt – and its faith in the stars. Our mixes have mixes of sand, dust and clay.

In a small ranch house surrounded by her. I feel so much closer to the sky in my Mexico. I understand I’m technically wrong.  Astronomists,? Gastronomists? Astrologists?

People with lenses and degrees and facts will tell me different, but I know how it feels.

Where’s the piece of paper that tells me you know the history of Colorada?

The towns and cities have cobblestone and pavement streets and they have to share what little they can see of the sky with heaviness of sounds and smells and opinions.

But Colorada has all of it. When the sun bickers, infuriating her, she becomes wretched in color and temper. But here comes the moon and the stars to calm her.

Tonight- underneath the moon, besides purple explosions of wonder dripping from green that has enveloped the adobe. I take my seat on Colorada

as she sulks into me after the music feels better and the whispers grow to laughter. The loudness of joy. And she feels smoother too. The crafty red head knows when to creep in. In our stumbling of consonants and vowels we realize she isn’t so bad. And we awaken her with our tire-bottomed heels to the sound of the strokes on the guitar and the splashes in our cup.

            Our ugly duckling. The consistency of my life. She remains the same. The music will stop and the conversations will fade. The lights will have to go. 

She doesn’t mind sharing the sky every once in a while. The unfathomable breadth of what the sheet of blue and silver touches. What my hands can hold. Who can name the constellations. Who can make the moon go home.