”Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.” Eleanor Roosevelt
There is a little old lady that I see on most of my morning walks around the golf course. She’s usually standing outside her house with her walker. She has the sweetest smile on her face. She always tells me “Buenos Días.” I have baptized her with the nickname “la abuelita de algodón” (the cotton grandma). The reason is that she is always dressed in white and her hair is the color of cotton. I love seeing her. Her smile brightens up my day.
Even though I don’t know anything about the cotton grandma, not even her name, seeing her gives me hope. She must be around ninety years old which means that she has seen a lot of heartache in her lifetime. She was alive during World War II, the Cold War, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the assassination of President Kennedy, Watergate, and many of the horrors that took place during the twentieth century. She’s Hispanic, so she has to have endured at least one exile. Only God and her know how many tragedies she has experienced in her personal life. And yet, she’s always smiling. She has perfected the art of smiling with her eyes since she still wears a mask.
She reminds me a lot of my own grandmother. Physically, they don’t look anything alike. My grandmother was tall, she’s short. My grandmother dyed her hair, she doesn’t. My grandmother never wore pants, she always wears white pants. But there is something in her eyes that makes me think of my grandmother. I think it’s the kindness and wisdom that I see when she looks at me, smiles, and says “Buenos Días.”
My grandmother was born in 1910. She was a little girl during the Spanish flu. She went through her first exile in 1924 when she left her native Spain and moved to Cuba. She experienced two world wars, the Cuban Revolution when President Batista was overthrown from power, and then Communism. She had her second exile in 1972 when she returned to Spain, and her final one in 1974 when she moved to the United States. But through it all, she never lost her joy. She always had a kind word to share or a wise story to tell. If she was still alive, we would compare notes between the 1918 pandemic and the current one. I can close my eyes and picture her wearing a mask as an eight-year-old girl in northern Spain.
Even though most of us are experiencing some kind of hardship either because of the pandemic, the economic crisis, illness, unemployment, or whatever we are going though, the old people in our lives should provide us with a sense of hope. They have seen tragedy at its worst. They have had to abandon their homelands. They have lived through war and disease. And yet, they still find a reason to smile. My own grandmother has been gone for almost 24 years, but I think she has sent me “la abuelita de algodon” so I can think of her every time I see her. This gives me hope that there is a brighter tomorrow waiting for all of us. I am full of hope that just like the cotton grandma and my own grandmother, I will find the strength to cope with whatever tomorrow brings.
Copyright © 2022 Christy Romero. All rights reserved.
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