Chataqua

Hannah M. Herrera

Where do I begin my story? I suppose I could start telling you about when I fell in love.  Ah, love: the place where the surge of life and adventure form and the previous self converges with what will become that person’s conceptual identity.  I guess that’s how all stories begin, every life begins with love.  Lovers become fathers and mothers, and children form an instantaneous bond with the one who becomes their maternal figure.  The forms of love make twists and turns, evolve and shift as the intrinsic parts of every human being writhes with never-ending change.

            Anyway, I guess I fell in love.  I do hate that term, though.  Does one actually fall in love? In reality, it’s quite an unsettling idea this whole out-of-control falling sensation people speak of.  As if you walk blindly through life, desperately grasping for direction; this pathetic half of a person, inevitably paired with another before a choice for love can ever be made.  Well, I suppose part of love is falling. Part of love is choosing.  The clumsy tumbling act of affection is the easy part, the part every radio blasts lyrical waves into the universe about, the part that most Hollywood movies venerate and lionize.  However, the part of love I would like to talk about is the underlying rhythmic heartbeat of it.  The part that brings eighty-year old couples to their sixtieth wedding anniversary, the part that is measured by hard work and perseverance, the part of it that is a choice.

            I had married young, well, at least young for today’s standards.  At that time, it wasn’t strange for a wide-eyed twenty-year old girl to walk down the isle and say “I do.”  What I didn’t realize was what saying “I do” could have possibly meant in its entirety.  The actual words should be “I will.”  I wasn’t pleased to realize that the man that I loved and committed my life to was tied to his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  But after all of the tactics I had implemented to try to persuade his longing to move back to the Southwest, it finally came down to one question: will you come with me?  And so, I gave the same answer I had chosen to give the day I married him: I will. 

            Someone once said that the only real decisions in life are the ones that are difficult, the rest are not really decisions at all.  So, I left everything I once knew as home to move to a place foreign to me.  My husband was now my home, and his culture and life in New Mexico would become my home as well.  It’s not that easy though.  I remember walking down the clean, sparkling streets of Portland, Oregon, where people dressed in heels and wore ties to almost everything.  Portland is a large city, with bustling traffic and big restaurants.  But what I would miss most about Oregon was the tall pine trees that reached so high it looked as though they were painting the beautiful misty sky.  Everything there was green.  In Santa Fe during the 1970s, it was dingy, dirty, the houses were falling apart, and there were many streets that were still unpaved. The trees were short, and there was more brown than green.  It was very different than Oregon.

            The land was not the only thing that I would say goodbye to.  I would say goodbye to long talks with my parents and my two brothers.  I would give up seeing my brothers find wives and watching their children grow older. It’s not like it is today.  Plane tickets were almost too expensive to afford, and there were no Alltel “My circle” calling plans.  There was no internet to write e-mails on.  We just had the house phone, with expensive long distance calls that were only made about once a month to Oregon.  It wasn’t all bad, though.  As those who have lived in New Mexico can tell you, it is the “land of enchantment.”  This name suits it well.  That’s what New Mexico will do to you if you stay watching the beautiful desert sunset long enough, or walk down the plaza of Santa Fe while the luminaries are burning: it will enchant you. 

            We lived in downtown Santa Fe, in the back of the office that Mike (my husband) used during the day to check eyes as an optometrist.  Our house was connected to the office by a door located at the back.  If you listened, you could hear our little poodle scratching on the door of the office, begging us to leave the office work at the end of the day and open the door to the house in the back.  If you came at the right time of the afternoon, you could smell the aromas of the dinner I was cooking mike seeping through the crack under the door and into the office.  We struggled for a while to get our feet on the ground, but we were happy.  And now, we were starting a family.  I was going to have a baby girl; we’re going to name her Ruth.

            I still didn’t feel like I belonged here though.  One time, when Mike and I were taking a walk down the plaza, a drunken man walked out of a bar and looked me up and down, then said, “You are the tallest woman I have ever seen.”  I was so mortified.  I knew I didn’t fit in here.  I was tall, blonde, blue-eyed, and proper.  I walked fast, and I was always in a rush, because that’s how people are where I’m from.  But not here: here people walk slower.  Here people know everybody and are probably related for that matter.  Here, people say things like “fix me a plate” and sprinkle Spanish into all their everyday conversation.  I didn’t understand any of it, but it was charming, and I wanted to understand.

            I am not a quitter though, and I was not about to give up trying to make Santa Fe, New Mexico my home.  So I took Spanish lessons for three years.  I learned about the culture.  I spent time with my husband’s family and learned about what people here enjoyed and valued.  It took me five years to feel like Santa Fe was my home, my place.  Now, I say things like “fix me a plate” and “bueno bye.”  New Mexico has been my home for thirty years, all because I made a choice a long time ago when someone asked me to move away from everything I knew, and I said, “I will.”