Proximity, furrows in the skin, seeding, fertilization and hoeing
My mother grew up in the plastic sun of a greenhouse on the coast of Almería; boxes of peppers, aubergines and tomatoes, racking between fish markets, alhóndigas and the days to the tune of the whim of time. Sweat and calluses on the hands, exhausted cervicals, the skin punished but intact the pride of those who live attached to the earth. The pride (and innocence) of those who do not know how to look down . They always looked at her from above with that disdain that we have, so many times, those of us who see the world as a race.
She wrote Miguel Delibes that “If the sky of Castile it is so high, it is because the peasants raised it from looking at it so much”, but it serves for every firmament in every corner of Spain — serves for each farmer, farmer, peasant and peasant attached to the terroir and memory-.
My mother remembers (still) that time with a mixture of tenderness and disenchantment, her eyes alight, her pride intact. “Because of the countryside I did not study, because I could not choose”, she says resigned but to the field she wants to return because in reality we are nothing more than what we were. Nothing more.
She may not know that the beautiful word laborer comes from Latin I will work what does she mean strive for something . She taught me that a man is not what he has, but what he does. She taught me never to look down on anyone and to reach out to someone else because: “what you give, you give it to yourself. What you do not give, you take it away". She taught me too to understand the importance of the seasons long before the rest of the world invented what they call sustainability ; because then it was nothing more than: "Autumn water for sowing, ice in December so that the plant is firm, turpentine in April so that the sown crops fluff up and strong sun in June so that the cane spikes."
She taught me to understand the importance of the natural cycle of things: the rancher and his herd, the shepherd's dog, the barges returning from their work on the lower sea at sunset, the office under an almond tree ; herbs, flowers and vegetables. Proximity, furrows in the skin, sowing, fertilization and hoeing. I understood that they (our peasants) are the sacred link between the land and memory, that it is not possible to grow without a solid root, that plants do not flourish without care, care and patience.
My mother has returned to the countryside, sixty years later and after a life locked up in official protection housing in a nobody's neighborhood; She has returned to a small farmhouse at the foot of a mountain where she looks up at the sky every day. She waters her little orchard and complains after every frost, shakes the olive trees, lights the forge . She has two dogs and so much innocence does not fit inside her. She keeps shining her eyes at him.