There was no high school in our village, so when I finished the eighth grade my parents sent me to Santa Fe to live with my tía Dolores and go to high school there. My mother cried for a week. My father sold twenty borregas he could not spare to buy my shoes and my books. I finished in the spring of 1931, and that summer I took the examination for the teacher's certificate at the county seat, in a hot room with forty other young people, and I passed. I was eighteen.

The county superintendent, Mr. Becerra, looked at my certificate and then at me over his glasses and said, "Can you ride a horse, señorita?" I said yes. He said, "Good. Cañada del Oso." That was all the interview there was.

Cañada del Oso was fourteen miles up the canyon from the nearest road a car could use, a little village of maybe fifteen families, higher in the mountains than ours and poorer. The last teacher had gone home for Christmas the year before and not come back. In September my father drove me as far as the road went, and don Antonio Peña met us there with two horses and a burro for my trunk, and I rode the rest of the way up the canyon with my heart in my mouth, wondering what I had done.

I lived with don Antonio and doña Juanita and their six children in their two-room house. I slept on a cot in the corner behind a blanket hung on a rope. Doña Juanita treated me like one of her own daughters, which meant I got fed well and I also got scolded, and I needed both.

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The school was one room of adobe with a dirt floor that we sprinkled with water every morning to keep the dust down, and a wood stove in the middle, and a blackboard that was really just boards painted black. I had twenty-three children, from six years old to fifteen, in all eight grades, and I had six reading books to share among them. I made flash cards out of flour sacks. I wrote lessons on the blackboard until my arm ached. The older children helped the younger ones, because there was no other way it could be done, and I found out that the big ones learned more teaching the little ones than they ever learned from me.

In the winter every child brought a stick of wood from home in the morning, and I came at seven to light the stove so the room would be warm by the time they came. Some mornings in January the ink froze in the inkwells and we had to set them on the stove to thaw. The big boys, Juan and Manuel, who were brothers and nearly as tall as their father, split the wood and carried the water without being asked, and I never once had to tell them twice. Little Eva walked three miles each way, every day, in her brother's old boots stuffed with rags, and she was never late in six years.

There was Pedro, who could not sit still for five minutes together, and who drove me to distraction, and who could add a column of numbers in his head faster than I could on paper. And there was Lupe, who hardly said a word out loud the first year, and who wrote the most beautiful compositions in English I ever read, about her grandmother's goats and the sound of the river at night. I kept some of them. I have them still.

The rule was still that we taught in English, and I did. That was my job, and I believed then and I believe now that those children needed English to make their way in the world. But at recess, and at lunch, and whenever a little one came to me crying, I spoke to them in Spanish, the language their mothers spoke to them. I could not do to them what had been done to me. Nobody from the county ever came up the canyon to check, and if they had, I believe don Antonio would have told them the trail was washed out.

They paid me sixty-five dollars a month, when the county had it. Those were the Depression years, and some months the county had no money, and they paid us in warrants, which were papers that said the county owed us. You could not cash a warrant until spring, and sometimes not then. I sent half of what I had home to my parents every month. I did not need much. Doña Juanita would not take a penny for my board after the first year. She said I was family.

At Christmas we made biscochitos in doña Juanita's horno, and the children acted out Las Posadas, going from door to door in the village asking for a room for Mary and Joseph, and Pedro was the innkeeper three years in a row because he had the loudest voice. In the spring we planted a garden behind the school, and the children took home the beans and squash.

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In the spring of 1936 there was a wedding in my home village, and I went down the canyon for it, and there was a baile that night. The music was a guitar and a violin. The young man playing the violin was from a village down the river, and his name was Alfonso Espinosa, and he played at every baile in the valley. When the guitar player took a turn alone, Alfonso put down his violin and came across the room and asked me to dance. I said yes. He was not a very good dancer. He was a very good violin player, and he had very kind eyes, and that was enough.

We wrote letters for a year. The mail came up the canyon once a week on a mule, and the whole village knew when there was a letter for the maestra, and the children teased me without mercy. We were married in June of 1937, in the church of San Isidro in Ojo de la Paloma, and Alfonso played the violin at his own wedding until my mother made him stop and eat.

In those days, in our county, a married woman could not keep her school. So that spring was my last at Cañada del Oso. On the last day, the children gave me a present. The big boys had made a little wooden box, and they had burned my name into the lid with a hot nail. Inside was a letter from every child, twenty-three letters, in English, with the spelling I had taught them. Most of it was right.

I have that box on my dresser. I read the letters every year on the last day of school, even now, even though it has been more than sixty years since I had a school. Then I taught my own children, and my grandchildren, and now I am teaching this tape recorder. It is the best student I ever had. It never talks back, and it remembers everything I say.