The first time she showed me the scar, she traced its path with her finger along the soft underside of her knee, like a small winding creek on a map. She was around five or six years old when it happened. Her life back then consisted of farming on the mountains of Luzon with her family and peddling vegetables door to door. One day, a large tuber she lugged on her head slipped and shot down like a cannonball to the back of her leg, splitting open skin on impact. That is how she remembers it.
Watching him roll his own cigarettes with the pungent tobacco he kept in a shoebox is one of my favorite childhood memories. How he would sprinkle the dried weed into the coarse, yellowed paper, roll it between his fingers, and then with one fluid motion swipe the tip of his tongue along the glued edge.
I’m going to go backwards through this particular part of my story because I hate to end on a sad note. So that would place my friend John and me in 2005 in a small churchyard on Route 30 in Barbour County, Alabama somewhere between Clayton and Eufaula, from where we had just come. Mid-July and we’re standing in a patch of shade at the back of the church, the only relief available, it being three o’clock p.m. in the sunny damn hot south.
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