Little Salt
White and cold.
Everything was covered in cold white.
The fields that provided for us.
The trees that shaded us.
My abuelo’s hunched shoulders as he trudged to the barn to milk the cows.
All were blanketed in snow.
It was the coldest stretch of days and the heaviest and deepest of snows that the low country of South Carolina had seen in a hundred years.
It was the first time I had EVER seen snow.
Mamí had her arm around me.
We snuggled close together.
We watched my abuelo disappear into the blinding whiteness of the pouring snow.
“Eso es nieve, Little Salt,” she whispered. “That is snow. Es tan, tan hermoso, ¿no es asi?
It’s so, so beautiful.
It makes everything look so bright and clean and new.
But, you know what?
I’m thinking about what’s underneath that snow.
I’m thinking about that because of something that happened to me when I was a little girl in El Salvador.
Every Sunday afternoon, mi papí and mi mamí would take me and your tias and your tios to San Salvador.
We all worked so hard on the farms and in the fields from Monday through to Sunday mornings.
We campesinos loved Sunday afternoons because we were allowed to go to Mass and then sit together and enjoy the evening in the city park.
Everything looked white, clean and new in the city center.
White, clean and new.
We were walking down the sidewalk, papí in front, mamí behind him, and siete hijos in a row from the tallest to the shortest.
A land owner was walking up the sidewalk toward us.
As was the custom, we stepped off the sidewalk to let the land owner pass.
I looked down at the ground.
I saw a surprising thing.
The sidewalk had a small crack in it.
Out of that broken place grew a flower.
A tiny flower.
Even though I was wearing my Sunday dress, I knelt down on the ground close to the flower.
I cupped my hands around it so I could really see it.
It was the most beautiful flower I had ever seen in my life.
It’s still the most beautiful flower I have ever seen in my life.
Its petals were yellow.
Its stem was green.
And the center holding its seeds was brown.
The yellow was the color of the early morning sun.
The green was the color of the fields at dawn and dusk.
The brown was the same color as my skin.
There was the flower, growing through the hard, white concrete that covered the earth!
That’s why I’m thinking about things that are covered up, Little Salt.
About things that are underneath.
Most of the time, you can’t see them.
But they’re there.
And they’re beautiful.
They’re making a crack in the sidewalk and they will be seen, and grow and make the world un lugar mas hermoso.
A more beautiful place.
Estamos aquí, mi hijo.
We are here.”
Author’s note: In this piece of prose poetry, I’m trying to show rather than tell how often I am the snow, concrete and land owner while my immigrant students and their families are the flowers
