Alejo, Javier, and Aaron stick there heads up in the window. I hadn’t seen them, but I’m not startled. After all, how scary can 6-year-olds be?
They’re some of the kids who come Wednesdays through Fridays to the kids’ programs. Today’s Saturday. My day off. Sometimes.
“Hi. How’s everything?” I ask in Spanish.
“Fine.” Alejo answers. “And that’s pretty,” he comments on the song I’m playing.
“Yeah.” It’s not often I get the little keyboard out. I love music, and this thing got its handles hacked off with a saw so it could fit in my suitcase. I’m out of practice, and I don’t think it’s pretty at all. But I smile anyway.
“What do you want?” I ask. I like the way we talk here. You can say what you want to say. You ask questions bluntly with other kids. It’s not like it’s rude or anything. It’s the way I was spoken to when we started all of this, and now it’s the way I talk too.
“I want an orange.” He says. “Can I have one, miss?”
I try to keep myself from laughing. I’m not exactly one of the people I think should be called miss. I pretend to think for a while. “You can have one.” I say. “One.”
“Okay.” They disappear into the back yard where the fruit trees are. About 5 minutes later, they’re back.
I’m handed an orange through the window. “Peel this, can’t you?” Alejo says.
I go get a knife from the kitchen. I grab the orange out of his hands. The knife goes around and around the orange, cutting the peel off into a shape like a long curly snake. I cut the top off of one side and hand it back. “Here.”
“Thanks. We’re gonna go play marbles now.”
“Okay.” I sit back down and realize how different everything is here.
How much I’ve changed. The way I talk, the way I handle things, the way I live.
It’s not strange to me anymore. Because being here, every day, is just another normal day of my life.
Because I’m here, peeling oranges.