I love you Grandma. in Musings

I consider myself a rational man… I consider myself a very educated man… however, there are something’s that supercede my book knowledge and coalesce into a spiritual realm.

My cousins chatter behind my back because they believe that because I’m half Puerto Rican—my family doesn’t deserve the land that we inherited… granted the land was taken care of by my cousins, but when I became successful, I was the only one of my family… in my entire family that could afford to take care of the land… and we’ve had hefty offers to sell the land… and I’ve discussed it with my siblings and my mother and they’ve always left it up to me… why is it that if I’m not enough, that I’m always left with the biggest responsibilities of our household?

I don’t want to sell my grandparents land… I feel at peace here and there’s some sort of spiritual connection that I can’t explain that ties me to this soil.

My cousins and my aunts snicker about behind my back… and because they think that if they speak a dialect I won’t understand because I’m not fully Puerto Rican… but they don’t know that my grandmother taught me the dialect and I understand them fully.

They think I don’t belong here. That I’m just a “spoiled fucking American brat” “he’s not even Puerto Rican” “wasn’t his mother destitute and poor in New York?”

I just want to scream and tell them… why do you hate me so much??? Because I had opportunities? Because I’m successful? Because I’m American born and Puerto Rican raised?

They’re fucking right… I will never be Puerto Rican. I wasn’t brought up on this farm… but this farm was left to me and my siblings… if being Puerto Rican means that I have to be a heartless cold-hearted bitch, yeah I’m not Puerto Rican…

“Oh Andre is a faggot, and he’s dating a white man… didn’t he beat him? Well, Andre probably deserved it because look at how he talked to Tia”

But these gossiping pussies don’t see that I may be a faggot, I may have come from nothing, but my mom has an apartment I pay for… my mom, even after rejecting me for being gay, I still take care of her and I have a business… I have expensive clothing, I have a driver that takes me to the mountains in Ponce and he drags my Louis Vuitton luggage into this farm house, and I don’t say shit… I throw my luggage around, I have my little baby cousin a small Louis Vuitton luggage and she throws it around and I don’t care.

But they’re children are bums… they’re sons don’t make money and they sell drugs at what is called “a punto” which means a cul de sac where they sell drugs and they kill each other with machetes over who’s going to sell the most cocaine, the most crack, the most heroin. Are you upset that I can afford these acres of land and it was left to my family and there were 23 of Grandma’s children and a sleuth of her grandchildren, but she left it to me and my siblings… not to my mother…

I just want a place where I can feel like my family is with me… I’m not pretending that I don’t accept my drug dealing, murdering cousins into my grandmother’s home…

I pay for it… I pay the property taxes and I pay to hire help to feed the livestock and I pay my cousins to tend to the sugarcane fields and the coffee fields… my grandmother use to grow watercress by a shallow river bend… and I use to go with her and she’d feed me this spicy little plant as she plucked it out… and it’s one of my most treasured memories…I mean I’d get really sick because I’d eat handfuls upon handfuls of it… but I’d still go with her to pick it and even though I’d greedily eat the plants to sickness, I’d still do it and never once thought “maybe you shouldn’t eat so much of it”

I’m not by any means rich… I don’t make billions of dollars… but I can pay a livable wage to preserve this farm the way my grandmother and grandfather kept it. I know the secret alcove that my grandmother use to take me to, where there’s a statue of the Virgin Mary and she grew red chilis… and I’d pick them with her and she’d tell me “listen you little crazy runt! Don’t pick too many and don’t scratch your face or your eyes” and I’d scratch my face and eyes and my grandmother would spank me lightly and say “please dear lord, this kid is so immensely dumb!” And she’d rush me to the house and strip me of clothing as I’m crying my life away because I’ve sacratched my eyes and now I’ve scratched my groin and my mother would rush in as my grandmother would peel my hands away from me and spread my legs so that my mother could pour fresh cow milk on my dick and my grandmother would splash cow milk on my eyes…

Yes… I am a spoiled kid… but I was a spoiled brat because my grandmother adored me… she adored me so much for being a halfsie… she loved that my skin was tan and my hair was the color of obsidian and my eyes were slit like an Asian boy and my eyes are the color of “roasted coffee beans” “My Andrecito, my little chino, you’re coffee bean eyes… the most handsome little boy that is mine” she’d say and use a baby voice and she’d hug me so deep into her pelvis. She smelled like firewood, cut grass, cilantro, boiled water, roses, soil, she smelled like pennies and her hands felt like soft leather.... I’ve never felt more home than I felt when she loved me… I don’t know why she loved me as hard as she did… I was one of 78 million grandchildren.
She also told me that I never belonged to her or to the family…and I cried because I wanted to be hers and be my mother’s… but she told me that I wasn’t my mother’s… that I wasn’t hers… that I was new and I was special “When I leave this world Andrecito, I’ll be with you always… a nd when you leave the world, I’ll be waiting for you and you won’t have to ever come back again, you’ll be in abuelitas arms… you don’t belong to me, you’re new to us”
Maybe why I feel so displaced… because I don’t belong…I’m not like my siblings… I’m not like my father or mother… I’m not like my grandmother… or maybe I’m most like my grandmother—and now thinking about it I’m very much like my sister…
and thinking I’m an Aries and my grandmother and my sister are Aquarian’s… born on the same day… February 17… and my sister and my grandmother always, always fought so hard for me… they didn’t understand me very much but that was why they love me so much… I throw no caution to the wind… and my free spirit as a fire sign rings with there more controlled spirit as air signs… you don’t control air and air knows how incredibly powerful they are so they are cautious, you can’t contain fire, but you can nurture it and control it, it just takes a strong person to control it.

Anyways… I’m rambling.
Xoxo
Andres