People Make Places

How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - like rags and shreds of your very life. ~Katherine Mansfield

My life thus far has been rich with places that have shaped the way it has played out. The pen with which I have written my story has mothered several locations, all of which have inhabited the halls of my memory since I was a small child. However, of all these places, perhaps one of the most important is my grandparents’ house. It’s second only to my house, but that would be too boring to center an essay on.

My grandparents’ house is in Las Cumbres, on the outskirts of Panama City, isolated atop a hill, with a beautiful blanket of emerald spreading around it for acres. The house itself is very antique looking. It’s painted a monotone sand color outside, the dull red tiles of the roof being the only other color visible at first sight. However, as one walks through the small gate leading into the porch, the house comes to life with vibrant hues. The patio’s floor is made of crimson colored tiles, and the main wall, which has the front door on it, is light brown. The stairs leading from the porch to the entrance are grey marble. To the side there is a small path that leads to the fenced area where they keep the many parrots, dogs, and, at one time, even toucans. Everything inside gives a sense of home; from the small marble statues my grandmother keeps in the living room to the everlasting smell of consistently good food wafting from the bright yellow kitchen. This is the house where I spent a large part of my childhood and where, even now, I can become a child again as soon as I walk through the door.

I guess this house was my house for a time, however short it might’ve been. When my parents had their first child, my sister, already two years into their marriage, they decided they needed a new place to live. They were young, happy, and, as with many newlyweds, broke. This, coupled with what they felt was an increasing sense of insecurity that had settled over the city in the aftermath of the American invasion, prompted them to kindly ask my mother’s parents if they would mind them living there for a while. “A while” slowly became four years and, before anyone knew it, yours truly had been born. I only lived there for a little less than a year before my parents moved us back to the city. However, we made it a tradition to go back to the house in Las Cumbres as much as we could.

As a child, this place was the huge backyard that my apartment building lacked. The grass, dirt, trees, hills, and rivers that surrounded the house were the elements of many stories I will be sure to tell my children. At this house was where I first learned to ride a bike and, after being tricked into speeding down a hill that had a dangerous ditch at the bottom, not to trust either of my sisters. It was also where I learned what it felt like to be stung by more than ten bees on the head, where I first saw a crocodile, where going every Christmas Day taught me what the holiday was really about, and where I expanded my knowledge on many other things. However, all these things pale in comparison to the greatest lesson I learned in this place: how important family is.

Whenever there was an event worth celebrating everyone would go to Las Cumbres. At barbecues the old would sit, drinking wine, telling old stories, and, when they had emptied the bottles, singing old Mexican songs. At the same time, the young would run around pushing and shoving each other until either a cousin crying or my mother shouting at them would put a stop to the horseplay. Meanwhile, those who were teenagers, or as they liked to think of it, “too cool for all that,” would sit inside and watch T.V. or type away at a computer. In this house I learned that family is always there, no matter what. This I came to see as I got older, and, consequentially, so did many of my great uncles and aunts. As they were all close to the same age, what my mother and I sadly referred to as the “domino effect” began to occur, and, after the first one passed away, a large part of them followed. I saw that, although they were sad times, everyone would still go to Las Cumbres after the funeral, and, after a couple more bottles of wine and some reminiscing, most would be smiling and laughing again, celebrating life instead of mourning death.

However, most important than any of the things said so far, the one thing that stuck with me the most about the house in Las Cumbres wasn’t the house itself. No, instead it was the people who inhabited it: my grandmother, always caring enough to cook anything we wanted, even after she got sick and couldn’t eat normally herself; my grandfather, who went from rocking us on his lap when we were toddlers, to giving us advice on school when we became teenagers, to discussing golf with his son-in-law; and my uncle, building puzzles with us, teaching us how to properly take care of dogs, and being the best Godfather I could’ve asked for. All these people taught me that, no matter what, family comes second only to God, and that you can never love someone too much.

Through all my experiences in this house I learned one thing. What makes a place special isn’t the place itself. It isn’t the beauty of a house that makes it important to us; it isn’t the experiences that took place there that makes the location live on in our hearts. No, instead it is the people that these places represent that make them so special. It’s what we all leave behind that echoes in our mind. It’s the shreds of ourselves, the imprints of memory we leave upon the walls that make these places worth remembering. The truth is simple, people make a place what it is, not the other way around, and I know that no matter what happens to that house in Las Cumbres, even if it’s remodeled a thousand times, sold, or torn down, my memories of it will remain intact, and, thus, it will exist forever.