Ode to Home
Our small, peach house in Little Haiti was the first that
my parents owned in this new land of Miami. In the good neighborhoods people
could afford to wrap their homes with tall, silver fences and plant mango trees,
and not have to worry as much about fruit pick-pockets. On our street, the
only thing enclosing the houses were patchy coated dogs that peed on the
hibiscus trees and green and brown beer glass pieces that made a crunching
noise under our bikes like someone chewing on beach sand in their Cuban
sandwich.
The color of the homes and the rainbowed graffiti on the
nearby stores flourished beyond the simple hues I had only recently learned in
daycare. The flamingo pink, powder blue, and macaroni and cheese yellow houses
were paletted straight from a Crayola crayon box.
Out of every car stereo or neighboring house party, there was music spilling out like puddles in the street for everyone to play in. The road
would sway like cotton clothes on a line to the rap songs coming from one
direction and the salsa tunes from another, and inside our
house the complaints of my parents, they can’t understand. My dad decided to give his neighbors a taste
of what real music is. The steel-drummed rhythms of the soca and calypso
cassettes chimed the china in the cabinets, pounded the walls three houses down,
and I imagined, thudded down a few green coconuts into the hands of the kids as
they passed.
Six years I blew the candles out in the one bedroom, one
bath house, witnessing two robberies, category five Andrew in ’92 from under
the dining room table, and driving up and down, down and up the street with mom
in the Nissan Maxima, practicing to get her license.
But everything we needed was in walking distance, including
my uncle’s convenience store. He wasn’t really my uncle, just a close family
friend from the same village as my parents. On Saturdays we went into the
confined store packed away in the corner of the shopping plaza.
It felt like entering a Toys”R”Us. My uncle would fill my pockets
with Jawbreaker and Crybaby candies and topped it all off with the remedy to
all my childhood woes, ice cream from the freezer. It was just big enough for
me to stick my head into and pretend to be a polar bear or a penguin. I normally
reached for the orange-cream flavored Flintstones Push-Up Pop. The wary sun
melted down slowly, like my sticky Popsicle, and I’d let the sweet iciness drip
down my cheek and neck as we walked back to our little, peach home.
-Amelia Badri
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