Home is a happy place.
Birthday’s live on our dining room table in front of the vitrina with glasses we only use for special people and special occasions.
We never think of ourselves as special so vitrina glasses are not for us.
We use the regular glasses above the stove in the kitchen that often break while washing them.
Home becomes great meals of mangu, fried eggs, cheese, carne de vaca, rice and beans.
Mamá always makes sure we eat what we want. My personal request is salami or arroz con leche; the best rice pudding in the world.
My grandmother’s happiest moments are when her grandchildren go around and over each other trying to grab Apple Jacks, Chips O’hoy, and Oreos.
If we are in really great timing, queso geo con pan de agua, Hojelitas, or Coconete brought by one of our cousins or uncles from Dominican Republic who find hotels in our apartment in Brooklyn.
Home is a binary.
A split between American schooling and Dominican dinners, but somehow we never miss a Thanksgiving.
That doesn’t mean that we are all together, just that my grandmother cooks more ribs, chicken, and of course turkey she will always complain about because “Ni le pusieron la mano.” We did not even try to try it.
Every year she swears she will never cook it until the next year and the year after that.
Turkey stops my Sophomore year in college. I ask my grandmother why and she yells that we never eat it and the women that use to come on Black Friday to get a piece do not come anymore. There is no one to cook it for.
Home is a long hallway. You get lost in it.
The end is separated by 3 rooms who hold different worlds of lives, dreams, and sadness.
None stay the same because it lives in between all of us. I have three different bedrooms before I go to college each becoming home and a visiting place at one point or another.
The living room is a wall made of mirrors and an open square perpendicular to the dining room and the kitchen. The TV playing Cantinflas or Guerra de los Sexos sits in that right corner.
The living room sleeps in our laughs and we each have a pair of ridiculous ones.
I say a pair on purpose.
One for my uncle’s stories where we wait for him to get off the couch and act out the scenario.
We learn to push the small table in the middle to the side to allow space for his storytelling.
Another for my grandmother who chimes in and cracks up looking at our laughter for approval.
Eventually she gets into someone in our family and rambles about why they can’t keep a boyfriend, are bad mothers or a mujeriego.
I always make sure to catch the end in between pretend laughs because her best advice lives there.
Home is grace.
It is the walking lessons my mom gives me with books on top of my head in the basement that is our apartment.
My favorite moment is when we paint an entire wall yellow using green paint to leave our palm prints on the wall.
We do not need to write our names on the upper right hand corner or signatures next to the X to know we left our mark somewhere because the white plastic covered couches in our living room witness it.
My mom fills every wall with items she loves. Photographs of family and plants and candle holders with candles she never turns on.
My mom has an ambition for clean spaces but sometimes she does not have a choice.
Our black rug always floods.
I grow up to the smell of moist.
The landlord never acknowledges the fact that the pipes are too low. Instead, it is our fault that the pipe lines over flow because we put tissue in it.
We spend years pouring Clorox down the toilet hoping it does not overflow again.
We watch our step while entering home hoping that our toes do not get wet with bowery from our block that finds itself on our floor.
We shift from rugs to tiles where we never experience a flood again.
I’m still not sure if we found a cure for the floods or just hid the mess.
Home is a sacred place. Photos and sculptures of El Niño Santo and San Miguel document my grandmother’s holy spaces.
She spends two times a day for at least five minutes praying on the kitchen table, chancleta half off watching the víveres on the stove in between her rosary chants.
Always a sacrifice of one of her dreams for the dreams of her grandchildren, shifting poverty, or an abundance of love.
She prays for so long Jesus becomes a part of her.
Home are childhood experiences that lay flat on the walls of a house that after twenty years is no longer ours.
I walk down the block eyes half closed hoping to not look too hard at what is taken from us.
The third tree down is our base for freeze tag and the uneven concrete sometimes trips us over hide and seek.
I quickly glance into an empty home through the window my grandmother use to look out from imagining moments of love, compromise, sacrifice, and family.
The America we all know is taken from us for renovations for a new family with a higher rent in a gentrifying Brooklyn.
The red door to our home becomes brown with a stain glass in the middle.
The tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants my grandmother grows in the front yard are no longer there.
My favorite painting of a house by a river next to a red tree does not make it into my grandmother’s new home, neither do my memories.
Seeing my grandmother does not feel like home anymore, just a visiting place of space I imagine another black girl looks into reminiscent of her old home.
