I was five years old in the fall of 1918, and I remember that fall the way you remember a dream, in little pieces, very bright, with dark between them.

The influenza came to the village in October. People said it came up the road with the men coming home from the war, or on the train to the town down in the valley, and from there to us. Nobody knew. It came to every house at once, it seemed. The church was closed, and the escuelita was closed, and the padre, who came to us once a month from the town, did not come. The people stopped visiting each other, which in our village was the strangest thing of all. I remember standing on the portal and the whole village being quiet in the middle of the day.

Then my mother was sick, and my brother Ramón, and then me.

I do not remember very much about being sick. I remember being hot, and then cold, and my mother's bed, which we were all in together. I remember the smell of oshá boiling on the stove, which to this day I cannot smell without being five years old again. And I remember my abuelita.

My abuelita Paula was my father's mother, and she lived with us, in the room at the end of the house with the little window that looked at the mountains. She was small, and she wore black, and she had a dicho for everything and a remedio for everything else. While we were sick she never slept, that I could tell. She boiled the oshá and made us drink it, and she made atole and fed it to us with a spoon, and she put cool wet cloths on our heads, and she sat in a chair by the bed with her rosary and prayed in a whisper all night long. My father took care of the animals and the wood and the water, and he did not get sick, gracias a Dios. But it was my abuelita who took care of us.

We got better. One morning I woke up and I was hungry, and my mother cried when I asked for a tortilla.

And then my abuelita was sick.

She was sick only a few days. The curandera came, doña Inez, who knew every plant on the mountain, and she did what she could, and the padre came up from the town at last. My abuelita died on the first day of November, which is the day of All Saints. My mother told me afterward that it was so she would have good company on the way. I believed that then. I find that I still believe it.

Nine people from our village died that fall, and some of them were young. I did not understand then what that meant. I understand it now, and I am grateful I was too little to understand it then. They are all together in the camposanto on the hill above the church, and when I was a girl we brought them flowers every year. I have not been back in many years. Christina says she will drive me next summer, si Dios quiere.

I still have my abuelita's rosary. It is in the drawer by my bed. The beads are black and worn smooth, and when I hold it I can still hear her whispering.

~

The next fall, in 1919, when I was six, I went to the escuelita for the first time.

The school was one room of adobe at the end of the village, with a wood stove and long benches, and about thirty of us children of every age. That year we had a new teacher, a young Anglo woman named Miss Kimes, from Kansas. She was very pretty and very young and had never been so far from home in her life. She did not speak one word of Spanish. And I did not speak more than ten words of English, and most of the other children not many more.

On the first day, Miss Kimes told us the rule, and one of the big girls who knew some English told the rest of us what it meant. We were not allowed to speak Spanish in the school. Not in class, not at recess, not anywhere in the schoolyard. That was the rule they gave her, and the rule they gave most of the teachers in those days. If she heard you speak Spanish, you had to stand in the corner with your face to the wall, or stay inside at recess, or write sentences on your slate.

I spent a great deal of that first year with my face to the wall. I learned English the way you learn to swim when somebody throws you in the acequia. For the first months I did not say anything at all at school. I was afraid to open my mouth, because whatever came out of it would be wrong. At home I talked so much my mother said I was making up for lost time.

I want to be fair to Miss Kimes. She was not a cruel woman. She was following the rules they gave her, and she was nineteen years old and alone in a village where she couldn't talk to anybody, and I think now that she was terribly lonely. She taught us songs. She had a picture book with a giraffe in it that I loved more than anything. When she left at the end of the second year she cried, and so did some of us, and I was one of them.

When I was ten, the county sent us a new teacher, Mrs. Cisneros, who was from a village not so different from ours and spoke both languages. She kept the rule in class, because she had to. But at recess she let us talk however we talked, and when a little one was crying she knelt down and comforted him in Spanish. In her room, English stopped being a punishment and started being a key. It opened books for me. It opened the whole world. One day, when I was about twelve, Mrs. Cisneros kept me after school and told me, "Guillermina, you should be a maestra." Nobody had ever said such a thing to me. I walked home that day without my feet touching the road.

Many years later, when I had my own school, I remembered both of them, Miss Kimes and Mrs. Cisneros. I tried to remember the right things from each.