Julieta

Me and my childhood friend Julieta, Bahia Kino, Mexico.

So when I was little, my grandparents used to live in Mexico in the winters, in a little, not-at-all-touristy town called Bahia Kino. Generally, poor Mexicans lived in the actual town ("Old Kino"), and Americans (including my grandparents) and rich Mexicans in a long row of houses strung along the beautiful sand beach ("New Kino"). 

I used to go down from a very young age (8 or 9) and spend a month or two there each winter. (The fact that I could miss a month or two of school had more to do with the quality of our school system vs my intelligence. I did bring my books and keep up.)

My grandpa had made friends with one of the families in Old Kino...a mom and dad and 15 or so kids living in a two-room dirt floor tar-paper shack. One of the daughters was close to my age, and my grandfather asked if she'd take me to school with her each day, and home to play after. She said yes. This is how I met Julieta.

The money/class distinction never bothered me, never even entered my mind, really, I think because I was in her (Julieta's) world day to day. I would have been lost without her. In the beginning, I didn't even speak the language (no one in Old Kino spoke a word of English). Plus my parents (and grandparents) had raised me to be very open-minded.

The way I remember Julieta and her family is happy. Loving. No one went hungry (in fact, the food is one of the things I remember most fondly from that time. Tortillas patted out by Julieta's mother, charred on top of a rusted oil barrel with a fire burning inside and then you went over to the enormous pot of beans and scooped out what you wanted to go with your tortillas...absolute heaven). Everyone had what they needed. They lived right by the sea in this idyllic little village. And they were so nice to me...I have never had people be nicer or more welcoming.

I went to Kino every year through high school, and then didn't go back for many years. Julieta married and had her babies while still a teenager, just like the rest of the girls. She moved to the big city, a house with tile floors, she and her husband running a little convenience store on a corner on the edge of the city, near the airport, where the roads are still dirt and rutted, not paved.

I've been back to visit a couple of times in the past few years, and it's been awesome. One cold winter afternoon on my first visit, Julieta and I curled up under the covers in her bed, a little Spanish-to-English dictionary between us (my Spanish has hugely atrophied), talked and sign-languaged about what had been going on in all the intervening years, laughed and cried and it was like no time had passed at all.

Other than my two fairly recent visits, it's been really hard to keep in touch with Julieta...phone calls and emails...the technology for some reason does not work for us consistently. But I'm writing about her today because yesterday we became Facebook friends (yay!), and I have high hopes that that is going to make it easier for us to keep in touch. 

Our backgrounds and lives could not be more different. But she is without a doubt one of the people in this world most dear to me.

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!

XOXO