Mari II

I look forward to getting old. Maybe not the part where my body gradually poops out on me, but definitely the part where I start being able to get away with everything. Yes, I fully expect to be a batty old broad when the time comes.

Mari, Hernan's grandmother, gets away with a lot, and she fully deserves to. After ninety-six years, during probably eighty of which she awoke at five every morning to take the corn to the mill, to grind, to bring home, to make into tortillas for breakfast, I think we can all cut her a little slack.

Just now she woke up Hanix. This is a pain, because for some reason my giant child doesn't care to sleep much. His naps last about 30 minutes tops, and I can only get him to nap on occasion. (A line from the movie The Ring keeps coming back to me: "She never sleeps!") Mari woke him up by hollering at who knows who that she didn't know where the people who live in the house were, who knows when they'd be back. All the while my mother-in-law was there shushing her.

But like I say, the woman deserves some slack. Besides, although she may have woken him up just now, there are plenty of times when she prolongs his sleep by rocking his little hammock-crib thing that we suspend from the pig hook in the ceiling (Yes, the pig hooks in the ceiling for hanging pig carcasses from and pig scales for weighing huge babies). The movement keeps him happy and asleep. Sometimes she even does me the favor of rocking the crib when Hanix isn't in it. Just in case.

And for the most part she gets to do what she pleases. She rakes the back lot, for example, even though the back lot is just dirt, and, especially now that it's the dry season, raking just stirs up a huge dust cloud that comes billowing into the house.

I mentioned in an earlier post how things disappear into her room. Recently my mother-in-law tried to store a bag of my sister-in-law's belongings in Mari's room. Mari opened the bag up and started sorting through the objects, picking out what she would keep and what she didn't need.

And yesterday we were eating lunch in the back lot, where we'd moved the dining room table and chairs on account of the new floor project going on. When my mother-in-law told Mari to come sit at the table with us, Mari refused and decided instead to perch on top of a heap of boxes and scrap wood and bricks. It couldn't have been comfortable, but why not let the lady do as she pleases?

I usually can't understand what Mari says. Between my poor Spanish, her old-person accent and vocabulary, and her missing teeth a fair bit gets lost between us. I did understand her, once, when she told me that she hadn't bathed in some six years or so. Let me tell you, I believed her too. Since then, however, my mother-in-law has started to shower her once in a while, which Mari protests vehemently. She refuses to get up, and even fakes a cough to get out of it, since we all know you can't bathe when you're sick. Even in May, in the scorching heat, she complains that a shower would kill her, on account of the cold. My mother-in-law puts adult diapers on her at night, but when Mari manages to remove them she sometimes then soils herself. My mother-in-law is then firm about the shower.

So maybe there are some downsides to getting old too, such as being showered against your will and wearing Depends. Still, I'm fond of the woman, and I hope we help her enjoy her last years.