Our village was called Ojo de la Paloma, the Spring of the Dove, because of a spring that came out of the rocks above the church, where the doves came down in the evening to drink. There were about thirty families, all along a little river at the foot of the mountains, and the houses were adobe, with thick walls and vigas across the ceiling and tin roofs that sang when it rained. In the middle was our little church of San Isidro, who is the saint of the farmers. Everybody was some kind of cousin to everybody else. If you did something wrong at one end of the village, your mother knew it at the other end before you got home.

Everything in the village depended on the acequia. The water came down from the mountain in the river, and the men had dug the acequia madre a long time before anybody could remember, to carry it along the edge of the fields. Every spring, before the planting, all the men went out together with their shovels for the cleaning of the ditch, and the mayordomo walked along behind them and told them where they had done it wrong. Then all summer he divided the water, so many hours for this family, so many hours for that family. I remember my father getting up in the middle of the night when it was our turn, and going out with a lantern and a shovel to open our gate, because the water does not care what time it is.

My father, Lorenzo Trujillo, was a sheepman. He had about three hundred borregas. Most of them he kept on partido, which means they belonged partly to a rich man down in the valley, and every year my father paid him back so many lambs and so much wool, and what was left over was ours. It was hard to get ahead that way. Most of the families did it anyway, because what else was there?

In the spring the lambs were born, and there was no sleeping for anybody. Then came the shearing, when men came from the other villages to help, and the wool went into great long sacks taller than a man, and my brother Ramón and I were allowed to jump on the wool in the sacks to pack it down. I think that was the best job I ever had in my life.

After the shearing, in May or June, my father and Ramón and a herder took the borregas up into the sierra, where the grass was good all summer, and they stayed there in a camp until fall. Once every summer my mother and I rode up on the burros to bring them coffee and flour and lard and a sack of my mother's bread. It took all day. I remember the aspens up there, so white, and the meadows full of flowers, and how cold it was in the morning even in July. My father would come down off the hill to meet us with the dogs running ahead, and he would lift me off the burro and say, "Mira, the queen has come to inspect her flock."

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My mother, Teresa Montes de Trujillo, ruled the kitchen, and the kitchen was the center of everything.

Every morning before the sun came up she was at the stove making tortillas on the comal, so many I could not count them, and atole of blue corn for us to drink, hot, with a little sugar. My job was to bring in the wood and keep the box full. If the box was empty, I heard about it.

On Saturdays she baked bread in the horno. The horno was outside, a round adobe oven shaped like a beehive, taller than me. Early in the morning my father built a big fire inside it with cedar and piñon, and let it burn down for a long time. Then my mother raked out the coals and swept the floor of the oven clean with a wet broom made of branches, and she tested the heat by putting her hand in and counting. I don't know what she counted to. She never told me, and I never learned it the way she knew it. Then in went the loaves, and the door was closed with a board and sealed with a wet cloth, and in an hour the whole village smelled like my mother's bread. Nobody ever had to tell my brother it was Saturday.

At the end of summer, when the corn was ready, we made chicos. My father filled the hot horno with ears of sweet corn still in their husks and sealed it up overnight, and in the morning they came out roasted and smoky, and we pulled back the husks and tied them together in pairs and hung them over the vigas on the portal to dry. In the winter my mother shelled them and cooked them with beans and a little red chile, and they tasted like summer.

In September came the chile. We children sat on the portal for days, stringing the red chiles into ristras with string, and they hung all along the front of every house in the village until the whole place looked like it was on fire. My fingers burned for a week every year. Every year I forgot and rubbed my eyes, and every year my mother said, "Ay, Guillermina, otra vez," and washed them out with milk.

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When the first real cold came, in November, we had the matanza.

That was when the family butchered a hog for the winter. My father and my uncles did what had to be done very early in the morning, before it was light, and my mother always kept us children in the kitchen with the door closed until it was over. I was glad of that, and I think she knew it. By the time we were let out, it was a fiesta.

The neighbors came, and my aunts, and everybody had a job. There was a big copper kettle over a fire in the yard, and my mother and my aunts cut the fat into pieces and cooked it down for lard, enough for the whole winter, and the pieces that were left in the kettle were the chicharrones, hot and crisp, and we children were allowed to eat them out of a pan with salt. My mother made carne adovada with red chile and put it up in crocks. The men stood around the fire drinking coffee and telling the same stories they told every year, and laughing at them as if they had never heard them before. Nothing was wasted, nothing at all. That was the rule of the matanza and the rule of our whole life. Then everybody ate together at long tables, and the next week we went to the next family's matanza and did it all again.

We were poor. I know that now. We did not know it then, because everyone around us lived the same way, and we always had enough to eat, and there was always room at the table for one more. My mother used to say, Donde come uno, comen dos. Where one can eat, two can eat. I have tried my whole life to keep a kitchen like that. My children will tell you I have mostly done it, and that I always make too much.