I am chiseling my life into words!

~~~Beauty is a blessing and a curse, my great-grandmother, Antonia, known as Tonita is an example of this. She was from my mother’s side of the family. Tonita was so amazingly beautiful that up to this day, her exquisite beauty out shines her sins and her gorgeous looks are praise to outstand her memory in our family’s history.
~~~She had luxurious red long hair and the voluptuous curves were they count on a slim body frame. Here is where my Spaniard blood comes from and her white porcelain skin acknowledges this.
~~~However, it happened is lost to the factor of time. People do not last forever and with unrecorded history, the story tellers discriminate on choosing what they want remembered. Is this why it is so important to chisel my life into words?
~~~My great-grandmother, Tonita had a flaming temper like her hair but that did not stop her from becoming a concubine. Why they did not call her a mistress? I wonder. It demeaned her to me when I heard the term! Yet, to the relative telling me, it was a norm or better said a normality accepted as equal as saying - wife.
~~~In Puerto Rico were the word mistress has transgress since the island was colonized, it should of had not surprised me. Here where time has a knack of updating the word of mistress-hood, the latest version of the word is ‘my friend’. I think the shamed of being an adulterous erected her ironically proud, and evidentially, she was known as a concubine. Alternatively, perhaps, it was because she given birth to so many of his children, more in fact then his wife.
~~~Don Luis Sanchez was a powerful landowner who felt in love with Tonita. Lovely Tonita bore him a troop of kids. She even had twins though one of them died. She was loyally his inamorato and never waking to the fact that she mostly shared her body with him, in her eyes she was his wife.
~~~She had her own home in the country in the neighborhood of Marianna in Humacao. (Later on, Marianna would grow into a three sector each of which is mark in Roman numeral.) While most had homes made of tin in Puerto Rico in those days, she was his kept woman and had a wooden home on his land.
~~~People got up at dawn and went to sleep in twilight, since there was scarcely any money for the gas lanterns. They saved homemade candles for special occasions and emergencies.
~~~Most of the day was spend doing chores: washing clothes down the stream, picking fruits or vegetables, feeding the chickens, moving the horses or feeding the animals.
~~~Entertainment was mostly reading the newspaper but most people were illiterate, then again, only a few had the means of money. Money was hard to come by and most times, you exchanged a service or item for what you needed. My uncle exchanged eggs for milk. My grandfather traded vegetables for meat. Some of the countrywoman weaved baskets and sold them in town. This was the way of life.
~~~The radios were power by big batteries that look like the now a day car batteries. Some families would flock together and pull their money together to run one radio for all. They would listen to music, soaps or horse races.
~~~The biggest entertainment of all was not gossip but other people’s lives. They claimed they were interested in your life because they loved you. I agree with them! They had no malice and when malicious intend showed up, it was a matter of self-protection.
~~~Life has many ironies. Don Luis wife who was older then him, she passed away. He was too concerned with what his relatives and kids would think. Don Luis did not see it proper to move in with Tonita.
~~~No one knows if Tonita really mistook the medicine bottle! Did she kill herself? When questioned when she was dying if she knew the bottle she took was poison, she said she never intended to kill herself. Did she reconsider?
~~~I think she felt scorned by living in the land that Don Luis own. His relatives must have been scared that she would win Don Luis to become her husband; they made her uncomfortable. She thought that perhaps Don Luis would take in her kids and raise them in better means if she were not around.
~~~Don Luis being by far an older man, decided to give each kid away to his relatives. He separated them and all emotional ties to him, somehow ceased.
~~~The trouble was that the willing takers were not financially stable. They were relatives that lived on his land and were indebt to him.
~~~My grandmother, Julia who was my mother’s mother was one of them!
My mother’s uncle Ramon took my grandmother in. Ramon was a poor farmer who work hard and had a family of his own.
~~~Julia shortly after cripple, yes, just unexpectedly, crippled at a young age. Why my mother has no idea and everyone I questions has not been able to give me an answer.
~~~Nevertheless, they gave Julia away again. Poor Ramon gave her to another uncle who married a Dominican widow who was a widow. She had a mute daughter.
~~~Again, I speculate my grandmother and her daughter got along with each other; they realized they would be good company together. My grandmother went to live with them as soon as he was married.
~~~Apparently, they were well off because they own a few hotels there. Her uncle was the one who searched for the proper medical attention to operate her, so she could walk. She walked at the age of fourteen.
~~~My grandmother was an amazing woman and she lived her life as if it was her last day, until she went senile. I think loosing her mother and going cripple, then finding the solace of a miracle made her cherish life to the fullest. She took chances and gave life her best (Way to go Granny!).
~~~I assume my grandmother was visiting relatives here in the island when she met my grandfather.
~~~
This is to be continue, any comments. Looks like no one is interested and the journey is to be experience by myself. Good!!!