Today is the birthday of my first husband and father of my firstborn child, Nina Velasquez . He’s on the other side of the Rainbow, but Happy Birthday, Mario. I will always love you in that special way you feel about a person you created a child with and lived in the mountains in a house with a wood cook stove and a potbelly wood stove to heat us as well.
And the time you brought a huge knot of cedar in and stoked the fire with it and I was nursing our little baby Nina on the bed next to the heater and you had gone back outside to chop more wood and the whole stove turned red hot, then the stove pipe also turned red and then the ceiling caught on fire!
His brother was redoing the plumbing at the time and we only had one faucet in the house with water and it was close to the floor in the spare (haunted) room in between the kitchen and the bathroom. Mario and his brother and our neighbor Joe Varela made a chain and kept passing buckets of water up into the attic and put the fire out.
We raised three pigs and he and his brothers slaughtered them and barbecued them in deep pits and we had a three day party where even the vegetarians ate some meat because it was the most delicious ever.
One time he cried just because he was so happy that Nina and I existed and were in his life.
Turns out there was another fire years later in that house and also in the house my family lived in in Llano which I returned to over a decade ago and got to see the addition our family had begun and built those adobe walla two thirds of the way up.
That house had also caught on fire and was remodeled afterwards until such a beautiful space, with a loft built over where my little loft which my dad had built for me over my mom’s upright piano had been.
That was a three room adobe house and we lived in it for over three years. We didn’t have running hot water but we did have a washing machine. Our bathroom was an A-frame outhouse with a blanket for a door. We always kept a container of lye in there to cover up the smelly stuff. We had chickens and goats and a horse with a colt and a pig and a huge vegetable garden.
Those years on our farm gave me strong bones because we worked hard and played hard and the air was clean and we played outside all day in the summer until our skin turned brown and when we went to visit our Grandma June in Colorado in July she would always say we were little brown berries or her little Indian girls.
We helped plant the seeds and picked up cow patties for Mama’s cow patty tea which she poured onto her plants. We climbed on hands and knees to pull out the rocks which the Mayordomo had placed on the acequia to keep the water from coming to us or to the Hog Farm – all while his alfalfa was very green that summer of drought.
He guarded that acequia with a shotgun quite a bit of the time, which is why we had to crawl to move those rocks and again to put them back before he would notice. He was not nice to us, but the Bandits had slaughtered one of his best cows and took the prime cuts, while leaving the rest to rot.
The people whose ancestors had settled in those mountains a few hundred years earlier and had battles with the Indians and slaughtered them and enslaved them and then married many of them were not happy about these white outlaw hippies moving into their territory. The Hog Farm got a bad reputation because the Banditos were regular visitors there.
We picked rosehips for tea during the winter. Mama made waffles with a wood stove waffle iron and yogurt out of goat milk. My sister and I fed the chickens and pig, tethered Lady our horse, milked the goats and tethered them to the best spots in the meadow where they could graze on the lush green alfalfa and sweet sorrel which makes your mouth pucker just like lemons. We also picked the dandelions for our evening salad and for Mama’s dandelion wine.
She made dandelion wine and all the folks at the Hog Farm loved it. When I went back to our place which Oxygen had bought (otherwise known as Oxy Gene, or simply 02), once I told her I was Lucien and Ruth’s daughter, she smiled and said that Ruth made the best dandelion wine ever.
I was 15 when I met Mario and our family was living in the same old Ranchero house on the Rincon, with that 100 acre piece of land – the orchards, and the pasture which extended all the way to the Pecos River and where Gilberto Lopez kept his herd of cattle.
It was Joe Varela’s job to keep the fences mended, but he was an alcoholic, so sometimes the cows ran away. One time one of our friends dropped by to let us know our cows were up at the Canyon Bar! A whole herd of cattle escaped through the barbed wire fence where it had fallen down and made their way on up the highway.
I met him at one of his parties. There was this girl there named Black Magic and she was starting fights with the Lujan sisters. Mario grabbed Black Magic by the shirt and dragged her out of the party, yelling at her that her fighting ways were not welcome at his home. I am not sure why that mesmerized me – probably his large smoldering dark eyes and his passion.
He was an amazing artist and used to paint tiles for Aries Tile Company. Some of them were R.C. Gorman prints. I even helped with some of that work.
I left him when I was only 19, but I kept his name legally, even though I remarried I returned to his name and not my maiden name. I had dreams that one day we would reunite somehow. My daughter told me that he smiled when she told him I still had his name.
I felt him when he passed. I felt him watching over me. And I feel him right now as I am writing this. He is no longer in pain. He’s on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge and he can see all of his loved ones all the time.
He lives on in our hearts. And one thing is for sure, I know what true love feels like. He truly loved me and I loved him too, I was just way too young and I ran away before understanding just how hard and cruel the world can be to single moms. I was 19 when I ran away. And now I am crying.
kameamoonmaiden 