I moved for the worst possible reason: a job. I moved four hundred miles north to the Central Valley. And I, the youngest of her children, the one she loved and cared for most, did the unthinkable during this time when she desperately needed me: I left her. She began to disintegrate right before my very eyes.
In 2006, my mother’s hard life of tending livestock, of washing clothes, of cooking and cleaning, of backbreaking work, of rearing her younger siblings before going on to birth thirteen of her own when she married my father - that life of pain and exhaustion, hunger and anguish, finally caught up to her. How could anyone possibly live here, I remember thinking. It was cold and damp, a dampness that seeped into my bones. It threatened to rain the day we ventured forth the clouds hung low in the sky, veiling the mountains that rose above us.
There were vast acres of abandoned fields with overgrown grass and tall trees that blocked out the light.
The feeling was only exacerbated when I visited that location with her as an adult. I recall being frightened and sad for her when she told this story. “I must have been about seven or eight, and my parents would send me off in the morning to follow them all day. “I watched a flock of sheep,” she once told me. She talked very little about her youth I only knew that she was very poor, my grandfather was domineering and abusive, and she was pulled out of school at age six to help her parents tend to the livestock that my grandfather raised. My mother had lived a long life that had often been complicated, especially in her childhood she was raised on a rancho in a remote region of Michoacán, Mexico. My mother lived nearby, in a house with my older sister. It took me a while to realize that I missed having a purpose. There was something off, and anxiety kept me awake at night, tossing and turning in bed. We drank stout beer from chilled glasses, listened to music, and slept with the windows wide open, the air carrying an intoxicating aroma of night jasmine mixed with shorn grass. We enjoyed backyard barbecues with friends. We hiked along the narrow footpaths threading through the brown hills behind our complex and had regular encounters with jackrabbits, road runners, and elusive coyotes that would stare at us through small glassy eyes from their posts atop boulders or old tree trunks tagged with graffiti. Our building was surrounded by eucalyptus trees with menthol-scented branches. My partner and I rented a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Riverside, California. I had just signed a two-book contract with a New York publishing house that paid me enough to live comfortably for some time without having to find a job if I chose not to. It was 2006, and I found myself a freshly minted MFA graduate, having spent the previous three years studying fiction in an intense program.
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