When Will You Come Home?

WHEN WILL YOU COME HOME?

Tia Elena gives me instant coffee in the mornings, no sugar
Steam rising from the cup in the cool of the morning after the night´s rain, birds chirping, the neighbor´s radio singing reggaeton, the bus to pueblo will pass by soon. She lives alone.

For me, she and her daughter, and I know this is dangerous to say, are my El Salvador.
She lives alone in a small adobe house next to mine.
We use her former Carolli Fruit Preserves barrel, from Chile,
As a water tank and each morning I bathe there because
The lamina roof over our barrel is too short for me, the foreigner, and I bump my head.

Her only daughter is 27 and lives and works in San Salvador in a kind of bad neighborhood
Cleaning house, raising a kid, cooking meals for a middle-class family.

Tia Elena works the land, normally she´s already gone these days by the time I get there.
She leaves at dawn to tend crops of sugar cane, beans, corn.
She warns me not to walk alone at night, to never walk alone.

At night I see her 8” TV, black and white, flashing images of murders, gangs, Chavez
Onto her walls. She goes to bed late.

She married once to a man who beat her. He carried her away to another place.
She lost four children with him and when the youngest, the one who lives in the capital,
Who is called Roxana, was born, she left him and has not talked to him since.

Roxana has six years of schooling and comes back every Saturday with a new
Haircut, acrylic nails, navigating half the county. She is alone, single, confident.

Tia Elena and I sit talking in the mornings about simple things: rain, family, our favorite foods, Her chickens, and our favorite: her flowers.
Her face marked with sun, a bright smile. She has roses, herbs, and others I don´t know the names of, all kept carefully fenced in with thorns and wire to keep the chickens out.

How the new generation of women will change this country
I do not know, but how Roxana and Tia Elena move together is beautiful.
She does not work if Roxana´s home. Roxana mainly sleeps, or visits friend´s houses or talks with a bus driver who has been her boyfriend for four years now.

In the weekday Tia Elena stops by often, helping us here at the house. She makes tortillas, Sweeps the patio, will wash clothes. She feeds a family of five who walk from a village an hour away to sell salsa, green peppers, tomatoes, and blankets a few times a week.
When she went to San Salvador once to see her daughter´s place, she had never been to the capital before.

When will Roxana come home?
They are two birds, two tall leafy trees, two brightly colored threads of silk intertwined.

In another country far away, after fifty nine years of marriage
My grandma died at the age of 74 and I wonder if my grandpa feels like Tia Elena.
He lives with my mom and step-dad now, drinks instant coffee.
I wonder how he thinks of himself without her, how Tia Elena thinks of life without Roxana.
Waiting.

Ocean waves on the Salvadoran beach erased my footprints on an October evening
When I was alone, getting used to here.
I remember how the water felt so good, warm, like home
And we carry on, the ocean salt in the air always on our lips.