My mother lives and works in a rural agricultural farmworker community that sits on the outskirts of Dade City, Florida. I love to go home to visit, this place where I too have lived and worked. But no matter how often I go home, it always takes me a bit to adjust to the sounds. There are cars going by on the street, just outside the window with their stereos blasting Mexican music. It’s always the whine followed by the quick riffs of the accordion that you hear first. Sometimes it's other folk who come driving through and the bass rattles the windows, boom, boom and you can feel it all the way into the back of your teeth. Sirens at intervals punctuate the days and nights, their piercing cries a sharp reminder that it’s not only angels who walk among us. And every now and then a sheriff's car rockets down the main street of this little community so fast it lifts shirt tails and blows back your hair,
There’s lots of people who walk
in this neighborhood; workers going to and from work, mothers with strollers
and little ones tagging behind, teens trying to hold themselves at just the
right angle to be considered cool enough and elders out for constitutions. Calls of
buenos dias along with the ensuing conversations fall like sporadic spring
showers as people pass one another. Yes, it’s a tough neighborhood, but manners
still matter.
The taco stand across from my
mom's house stays busy. Cars and trucks pull in and out, doors slamming throughout
the day as people stop by for food. You can get the best agua frescas there. I
like the sandia the best. They also have my favorite tacos, barbacoa con
cilantro, lime and onion with just the perfect salsa verde on freshly made hot
corn tortillas. On Sundays the men line up for their menudo to counter the
cruda from their celebrations of the night before. The covered picnic tables in front of the trailer are filled with
people eating, talking and laughing. Children dart between the tables and race
around the little stand. An errant dog picks its way carefully between the
feet and legs at the tables searching for bits of food that may have fallen to the
ground.
Serving as a backdrop to the
Sunday ritual at the taco trailer is a mixture of Mexican music from nearby
houses and cars driving by as well as the small African-American centric church
on the opposite corner. The church has a speaker wired up outside and they broadcast
their services. The musicians and singers are quite good. And it is in the midst of all
this cacophony that I feel it most, this is home.
But I must confess that there is
one bit of noise that no matter where I have encountered it, I have never
become accustomed to it; the crowing of a rooster. At home it is not uncommon
for there to be various broods of chickens ranging about different parts of the
community. Despite her claims that they are not her chickens, one such brood
has taken up residence in my mother’s backyard, accompanied by their very own
rooster.
This past trip home, a very rude
and overly ambitious rooster crowed me awake every morning around two am. Once
he stopped I would eventually fall back asleep, whereupon he would almost
immediately begin his next round of crowing. It was as if he had a little
chicken spy peering in the side of the blinds giving him the signal of when to
commence again. Talk about your “peeps”!
I truly desire to bring none
harm, but I fear that had I not left and returned to my own home when I did
that there may have well been a rooster gone missing. And if any thought to
notice the absence of Señor Gallo, that loud, raucous early morning songster, I
would have smiled serenely as I ladled out servings of a delicious pollo en
mole pobalno.
