Trying To Walk In Beauty

I was raised heavily on the side of my Diné culture. My home was a dirt-floored hogan with no electricity, no running water and no indoor plumbing. I was raised on a hearty helping of fresh vegetables from my mother’s and my aunt’s gardens. Fresh corn, watermelon, pumpkins, cantaloupe, squashes, apricots and at times, sunflower seeds. If my siblings, my cousins and I wanted sweets, we helped our shelves to the cactus fruits that grew abundantly everywhere and we went for the crimson fruit that sat on top of the cactus. The tiny prickly needles that pricked our tongues and around our mouths was all worth the kiwi-like sweetness. There was also the mini onion-like plant that grew everywhere. We became unstoppable when we got a a hold of a shovel and we dug as many as we could up. We would rub off the dirt with our thumbs and pop them into our mouths. The sweet and milky flavor was well worth that hard labor it took to dig them up. Then there was the yellow flower pedals that grew on the hillside around our hogan. They were sweet and pungent and we raced one another to pick and eat the yellow flower pedals.

My sister and I had to walk close to a mile to and from the water hole just to get a bucket of water. It was a lotta fun to swing the water bucket filled with water back and forth and watch the water slosh around until we got home only to get in trouble for only bringing back a little bit of water. Of course, we were sent back to get more.

I grew running barefooted in the hills near our hogan. I grew up riding bareback on my uncle’s horses which at one time, he sold right from under us because he needed the money. We were sad but quickly moved on to other horses. I grew up sweeping up dirt off a dirt floored hogan. I grew up falling asleep to the sound of the coyotes howling into the night and feeling safe in the womb of our hogan. I grew up waking up to the sound of my mother shuffling around in the early morning hours to the faint sound of a lonely owl hoo-ing away and my mother throwing an onion into the fire after she build one because in my Diné culture, an owl is a messenger of bad news. I fell back to sleep with my mom’s fire warming the bottom of my feet, then I woke up to the smell of my mom making tortilla over an open flame. There is something about the smell of kindling and sand and the cooking of hot bread. Nostalgic!