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Sparkle (1)
I awoke at two o’ clock in the morning, still very sleepy; all I wanted to do was to crawl back into bed, under the nice warm blankets. I could hear my mom calling for us to wake up; I could hear the urgency as she opened the door to our room.
“Hurry up and get ready! So you can come out and help make today’s lunch!” she said in Spanish.
All three of us replied still half asleep, “Okay, Mom. Ya vamos!”
It wasn’t that we were just lazy or didn’t want to listen to her; it was two in the morning and it was very cold. Our bedroom was that one bedroom that was always colder than the rest of the house, and yet during the hottest days of summer, it was also the hottest room in the house. My body was shaking from how cold it was, and my hands had trouble grasping at my shoelaces. When all of a sudden we could hear my dad’s voice echoing throughout the house, “Where are your daughters? Why are they not awake and here helping you?” he said to my mom.
We hurried and finished getting ready and grabbed our things as we bolted out the bedroom. All three of came squeezing out that bedroom door like sardines packed tightly in a can. We looked at each other in silence as we hurried to the kitchen, hoping we would not run into him. My mom just glared at us. She didn’t have to say a single word; the look on her face was enough. It was a see-I-told-you-to-hurry-up-and-now-you-made-him-mad look. She then went ahead and gave us each instructions on what needed to be done still.
I was raised in a typical Mexican family where there was a lot of machismo, meaning the men were in charge, and the women did everything for them as well as the cooking and cleaning. So, aside from doing all the “women’s chores” as my dad would put it, we still had to pull our weight working in the fields; we were field workers picking whatever fruit was in season, from small tangerines to the big grapefruit. We traveled to different cities and worked in harsh weather. The job itself was not easy; our attire consisted of jeans and tops. The tops had to be long-- sleeved and thick in material, to prevent the thorns from the trees from digging into our skin. It also helped keep us from being sunburned. The gloves were very thick and heavy like wearing a five pound weight, but only those that could fit them would wear them. We had to use small pruning shears that were very hard to squeeze, and they had to be - cleaned and sharpened every day. We also used a large sack, very heavy and thick in material; it was used to carry the fruit to the bins. We were plenty in that “cuadria” (a group of many people working together as a team) It was not just my family but many other workers; my dad was the patron (the boss).
After filling up the thermoses with hot coffee and packing all the freshly made lunches, we headed out the door. We were not allowed to leave past three-thirty, sometimes later, but that depended on the location of where we would be working that day. Climbing into the family van with the rest of the kids, we all snuggled up together to catch some more sleep. The men and other workers would climb into two separate work trucks that would take us to our work site.
As we arrived to our work site, they allowed us to stay in the van till a fire was started. It was still dark, we had arrived early so that once the sun started coming up and we could see what we were doing, we would start to work. We had to get as much done as we could before the heat would start to slow us down, and become too unbearable to handle. As I stepped out of the van onto the worksite, I could feel the cold hit me hard almost knocking the air out of me. I could see a small layer of frost covering the ground and patches of grass. The fog was lifting just a bit, but I was able to see a few feet in front of me. As I walked toward the fire, I could smell the freshly burning wood. It was mixing with
