Poor little brown kid

     Do you remember being a child? That wonderful feeling of being free, do you remember playing out in the dirt? I do. Since my 35th birthday is coming up pretty soon, I feel the need to take a trip down memory lane. I invite you to take off your shoes and walk with me...
     I grew up in the Central Valley in California, I was an immigrant child from Mexico. We arrived in Central California when I was just over four years old. My family moved to a migrant camp consisting of nine houses. Some were free standing normal looking wood house, others were made of cinder block. We also had two machinery shops that housed a work area for repairing the tractors and vehicles of the farms, or for storing extra supplies such as pesticides used for spraying the fields. We were twenty miles from the nearest town, and were surrounded by fields of tomatoes, corn, and cotton. And I loved it.
     The summer was my favorite time of the year. It was a time to race outside after finishing the daily chores, play with the other kids (most were my cousins) and just look for some trouble to get into. Whether it was sitting out in the yard sharing secrets with my female cousins, or playing hide and go seek with anyone old enough to count to twenty, we played hard. The evenings were enchanting for me as well. I never wanted to miss the first star, I was practically obsessed about it. Many times I was in trouble for eating only half of my dinner so that I could race outside to look for the star. I loved the color of a California sunset, with the dust that is kicked up from the fields, the sunset takes on amazing colors. It starts with white/yellow over the hills on the west side of the valley where the sun departs, where he finally takes his leave for the day, then...orange, followed by amazing red. All of this fades to an awe inspiring indigo...I see it in my minds eye and feel the heat left over from the day, I smell the wet dirt from the garden, I taste freedom.
     While most Americans identify home cooking as mac and cheese, I think of chewy, soft homemade corn tortillas, refried beans with Jalapenos, and fried chicken. It was not strange to eat the very animals that we fell in love with only a few months prior when they were just little chicks. Yes, we raised chickens, the kind that run around and peck at the yard, they were pets and a source of food. Not weird right?
     All of us would look for any opportunity to swim in any body of water. In our case, it was irrigation ditches and holding dams. Some were lined with cement, others, well...coming out of the ditch covered in mud was part of the fun. Don't feel sorry for us, quite the opposite, we were blessed. We could run around from morning into the night, without fear of being bothered by strangers, we all became family. We learned at an early age to explore, to look to hard work to provide for us in the future.
     There are days where I see my children sitting indoors in an apartment and worry that they will not learn the love for a handful of dirt, to appreciate a sunset or the vastness of the sky. I worry that they will not have a love and passion for seeing even poverty and want as a thing to be grateful for. Because, had I not had the childhood that I had, I don't know that I could love Gods creation as I do now. I grew up a poor little brown kid, and learned so much because of it. I am glad that I was able to grow up in a country in which I could go from a poor little brown kid, to a happy, educated (still brown) woman. Every time that I stand barefooted on dirt, I go back in time just for a second, and I feel the whisper of freedom that comes with it.