Some Things that Changed Me in Mexico

I.
I was new, an immigrant only months arrived.
I’d come in the store with tears in my eyes,
and confessed to the clerk when she asked me,
that the carpenter, months after his promise,
still hadn’t started the desk of my dreams.
She took off her apron in the bulk food store,
and marched me to the carpenter’s down the street.
When she hung up her apron, I had no idea
she would greet the carpenter by name,
give him the stink eye,
and open her hand to him for my deposit.
I couldn’t believe that then she walked me
many blocks away, to another CarpinterÍa
and translated what kind of desk I wanted.
Her name was Milagros, called Mili.
What she did that day stamped my move to Mexico
like a passport to gratitude for generosity.
The miracles of Mexico had begun.
II.
My nextdoor neighbor’s door was so close
she heard me groaning that afternoon.
It was sudden and fierce, the pain.
She knocked and entered, but all I could do
was moan and hold my belly, couldn’t think,
couldn’t be cogent to make a request or a plan.
She called to our maintenance man, Jose
who was painting an outside wall.
I don’t know the sequence or exactly what happened,
but then I was riding in his truck, doubled over,
and at the hospital ER he put me in a wheelchair.
The rest of the story turned out OK,
an overnight, a kidney stone, and home again.
But what I remember is trusting Jose,
when I couldn’t get clear to help myself,
how with his Mexican ways, so quiet, so calm,
José magicked me to safety.
III.
I’d moved the day before. Whew.
At four PM I finished cleaning the old place
for the inspection next morning.
I really needed my deposit back!
I tipped the coffee table up, to clean beneath,
and the top I thought was attached, heavy glass,
slide to the tile floor, broke into razor pieces.
I called every Glass store around, too late in the day
to send anyone to measure the bevel.
I walked out the door in a panic daze,
and there was Miguel the gardener
finishing up his job, clearing smashed mangos
from under the tall old mango trees.
He looked at my face and came right over
to ask me what was wrong.
Miguel measured my table and then
wrapped an edge piece of glass in newspaper.
He carried it under his arm and walked out the gate.
I knew he had no truck today.
I had no idea where he would go.
But at five o’clock he returned, had found a place,
to cut me a new glass top.
When Miguel walked in so calmly,
and set the glass on top of the coffee table base,
all I could do was cry my thanks.
IV.
Two years later, a knock on my door.
I hardly knew Luís, he’d moved
into the complex not long before I’d moved away.
He had to remind me who he was
before he handed me the letter.
It came for you, he said, to your old address.
He brought a letter from my son
who’d mailed it long before from Africa.
Luís gave a smile of pleasure
that lit him up like a sunrise.
It was stuck in the box at our gate,
he said, long enough to be weathered,
the envelope barely readable.
But I remembered you had a boy in Africa,
and I kept asking who knew where you moved.
I looked at this man,
who walked from the village where I’d lived
to the village I lived in now,
to hand me this precious letter from my son.
Mexican generosity, again,
not only undid my tears of gratitude
but made me a better human being.
©Susa Silvermarie 2025