A staircase named Desire
When we got to mom’s apartment last night, the men from Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador were sitting around the parking lot with beer and cigarettes. We went up the stairs and found my mom sitting there with candles lit all around her, smoking a cigarette and drinking a bourbon.
I wondered later as I was falling asleep if she takes comfort in the night air there, overhearing the man to man conversations in Spanish, listening to the dogs whimpering in the yard across the fence, if there is something in her that romanticizes this existence over coming over here to the bayou to live with a view of the water, the pelicans, around neighbors and family who would care for her, to be in the familiar that she seems to have been running from all her life.