Carmela and Pepe/Louis Villalba
One day in the Spring of 2019, I found my mother sleepy and bored in her chair. To cheer her up, I turned off the television, took out a notebook and a pen, sat down across from her, and asked her to tell me about her life. We chatted for two hours every afternoon for three months. Her sweet, crystalline voice resounded as she narrated her memories. Her eyes sparkled, her face lit up, and her body straightened as if she wanted to stand up and dance. My mother relived her youth and the beautiful years with my father, relishing the memories of their strong love. My dad had often said he loved his wife more than his children. My pen detailed on the paper everything she said. So many anecdotes I had heard and collected many times before, but now new ones filled the empty lines of my old diary. The accuracy and consistency of her accounts stood firm as rocks because my mother’s judgment remained intact until the end of her life.
The hurricane blew with a spooky sound
Experiencing a hurricane in Florida was something new for me. Its eye had supposed to hit us, but when it was a few miles from our coast, it unexpectedly changed its trajectory, turning upward and touching land about 60 miles north. But I felt some distant bands around its center: the wind was warm and dry as if coming from a furnace and smelled of algae, which had gathered from ocean water. It also blew with a spooky sound different from all the strong sea winds I had ever heard when I grew up on a building next to a beach in Cadiz, Spain. That area is well known for the intense eastern winds that originate in the Sahara Desert.
