Family Tree 2.0

My stomach is getting WAY too used to these regularly scheduled big meals. Noon rolls around and it starts screaming "FEED ME!". It's going to go into withdrawal when I return to Key West. Don't get me wrong I love a big juicy meal but sometimes I don't have time and I feed along the way. 

Joking around with Monica as Tio tries to pour me another glass of wine, she says "You're going to return an alcoholic!". Something I thought about on the Senior Spring Break trip as Tio kept pouring me wine the Senior ladies eyes bugged out with each glass poured. I had to stop him at two cause I didn't want the ladies to keel over.

I'm more worried about the five course meals I tell her. Which today, she asks me to come over and look in a pot filled with meat. "Do you know what this is?" she asks. "Beef short ribs?" I reply. "No it's deer" she says with a sort of grimace "Do you want some?". Normally, I would recoil at eating Bambi but my stomach is ruling and I say load it up! 

There's certain things I'm discovering that are ingrained. I guess it all stems from where you come from. Little things like, I like to eat dessert with really teeny tiny utensils; think espresso spoon. When I first had dessert here, guess what was used, Huh? So that's where that comes from. I love wildflowers especially the ones that look like weeds and they are peppered here everywhere. Different things I enjoy I am finding in Piedras.

The cousins come over most everyday to hang out to sun, eat and drink. They lounge and work a bit in the yard. I bounce in and out going places which they look at strangely but have kinda gotten used to it. I think it all comes down to our sides of the family. Which brings me to when Angel explained it all to me. It was the first week I was here and Angel pulls out his PC to show me the family tree.

On an excel org chart. 

I nodded and laughed; the family tree 2.0 style. After I helped him fill in my family branch (or bubbles) he began to tell me the story of our family. Here's what I heard: 

Pilar, my great grandmother, and her brothers headed for the States while their other brother stayed behind and lived on the farm. My relatives didn't have any money so they worked jobs no one wanted in order to make enough money for passage to the U.S. My great grandmother went first and when she found a suitable place to live she sent for her brothers. 

It was great, he has compiled a write up of the whole thing complete with family tree org chart and some amazing old photos in PDF format. We were flipping through a digital photo book on his computer. Many were pictures of the relatives together on the farm and one with a burro in the house.

As we looked over everything, it really helped to know the whole story. We did this over a drink they gave me - a little whiskey, coffee and ice cream. "It's very rich!" they all said and it was really good. 

I'm finding that after visiting different towns, I always like Piedras the best. Maybe it stems from originally being from here or that the family has been so nice. I don't know.

Angel whips out a flash drive to load all the info on and transfer it to my computer. "Wait. Is it Mac compatible?" I ask. He doesn't quite understand it. "Yo Tengo una Manzana." (I have an Apple) I explain. "Ah, Si!" he replies.

Somehow I don't think this is quite the conversation our former relatives would ever imagine us having.