About
Darlene Campos
Darlene P. Campos earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. When she’s not writing, she enjoys reading, exercising, and going to museums. She is Ecuadorian-American and lives in Houston, TX with her husband and their eight rescue cats.
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Visit her website at www.darlenepcampos.com
Standing Spoons
by
Darlene Campos
When I was five, I visited my great-grandmother during a family vacation to Guayaquil, Ecuador. For most of her adult life, she lived with my grandparents, serving as a babysitter, cook, housekeeper, and in my mother’s eyes, a sage. Everyone called her “Minga,” a Quechuan phrase meaning “coming together.” The day I met her, she reached out to me with her wrinkled arms and said, “Don’t you know who I am?” I shook my head, which she found amusing. She hugged me tightly and mentioned being happy to finally see me again, but I couldn’t remember us meeting each other before.
My other memories of her are fuzzy because I unfortunately never saw her again. After my grandparents moved to the United States in 2000, Minga stayed behind with a relative and her health instantly declined. Less than a year later, she died in her sleep at the age of 96. The evening she died, I remember our house phone ringing nonstop and I answered since my parents were busy. It was my aunt and her tone told me something terrible had happened. I assumed Minga was gone and I was right.
Fast forward to 2018, my grandmother, Minga’s daughter, showed signs of advanced Alzheimer’s. She couldn’t remember how to use her washer and dryer and once she nearly burned down her apartment because she had forgotten to turn off her oven. As my grandmother’s condition deteriorated, there was one person she continuously spoke to and it was Minga. She would tell me she and Minga went grocery shopping and they were going to make corn tamales for lunch. Other times, she said Minga had come over for a cup of coffee and they talked about ideas for Christmas dinner. I always went along with my grandmother’s stories. Sometimes I’d even wave at Minga to appease her.
Alzheimer’s only gets worse and the further my grandmother deteriorated, the more appearances Minga made. One afternoon, my grandmother endlessly talked to her sofa, certain it was Minga and they made plans to cook chicken and rice for Sunday dinner. But then as Alzheimer’s tightened its grip, the Minga visits became less frequent because my grandmother began losing her speech. Then, during a hospital stay, my grandmother suddenly gained words back and asked me through floods of tears, “Where is my mom?”
“She’ll be right back,” I assured her. “She went to the grocery store.”
With that, my grandmother calmed down and fell asleep.
Three months after my grandmother died, my mother was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. During her post-surgery recovery and other treatments, I became her caregiver and often cooked specialized meals for her. One food my mother particularly wanted was rice. A piece of wisdom Minga taught my mother, who then taught me, about making rice is that it is sometimes hard to know when it is ready. According to Minga, the trick is to shove a spoon into the center of the rice. If the spoon can stand on its own, the rice is done. Minga is quoted as saying, “If the spoon stands by itself, everything will be okay.” As I made rice dish after rice dish for my mother, I used the spoon trick, and each time, the rice was perfectly cooked.
The first time I met Minga, I did not know exactly who she was, but I learned. If her spirit was good enough to calm my ill grandmother and her wisdom remains steadfast with my mother, I now understand why she was so significant in our family. For me personally, sticking a spoon into hot rice became a therapeutic practice. Whenever I cook rice, I imagine Minga standing by me, making sure I do the trick correctly. It might sound ridiculous, but the more standing spoons I witness, the more confident I feel about everything being okay.