Memoir Excerpt from Prickly Pear/Cholla Bud chapter

 The desert wakes again with the rising temperatures. I can feel it stretching, sighing into the sun, the air turning warm and alive around me. I also wake in the desert heat and feel that deep pull to put memory to keystrokes. I am my truest physical self in the temperatures that soar near and above 100 degrees.

The stories, the faces, the pieces of memory that once scattered now begin to weave themselves together in my memoir. The thread isn’t broken anymore; it runs steadily, binding this life, this place, and every word I’ve been meaning to say into one long, continuous journey. This is the journey of a desert boy, a young man, and now an elder. The plants have always been my teachers; now they are my writing companions.

Excerpt from Prickly Pear/Cholla Bud chapter-
“Think of all the mouths these plants have fed,” I say. “Deer, rabbits, javelina, packrats, insects, birds. People whose names we will never know, whose recipes we will never taste, whose prayers still hang in the air like the hum of bees.”
I pause.
“My great-grandmother walked through war and crossed a border she did not know existed with nothing but what she could carry, but I promise you her body was built in part from nopales and tunas and cholla buds, from beans and corn, huitlacoche and wild greens. My grandmother Guadalupe’s blood had cactus fruit in it. My mother’s hands smelled like chile and creosote and sometimes the green metallic scent of cut nopales.
When I eat nopales now, when I roast cholla, I’m feeding everyone they were, everyone they could have been if the world had been kinder.”
A breeze moves through the prickly pear patch. For a second, every spine glints the same way. The pads look like rows of hearts, each facing sideways.
The younger version of me, the boy who thought American food came in boxes, who was afraid of what they called him, stands beside me, watching.
“So, this has always been ours?” he asks.
“Yes,” I answer. “Ours and not ours. Ours in blood, in geography, in story. Shared with others who have also loved and tended it. Not owned, but related.”
jlf

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