Hermano: My Brother

My earliest childhood recollection is of the sun.  It’s warmth wrapped around me like a blanket, melting down my back, caressing me tenderly, from head to toe, in a way that made me feel so comfortable and relaxed.  I couldn’t have been more than four years old because I remember lying there waiting for my older brother to come home from school.  He is one year older than me and had started kindergarten that year.         The sofa where I lay was coffee brown with caramel-colored flowers and blue or green leaves scattered throughout and it was positioned smack in front of a long, slender window in our living room for which my mother had sewn sheer yellow curtains that now only add allure to the memory of that day.  I could hear the clutter of my mother in the kitchen moving about as she took plates to water, spoons to pots, plates to plates, and yet I vividly remember being paralyzed by the euphoric state of comfort I was in, halfway between sleep and being awake.  The sound of the beat-up old yellow school bus finally awoke me and when I lazily knelt on the sofa to gaze out the window my brother was walking down the long dirt road in front of our house.  He couldn’t see me, but I could see him; slowly becoming more visible as he approached our modest little one bedroom home in the southern most corner of Texas just across the Rio Grande River in Edingburg.

Image obtained from http://www.dualbo.com/