This Kin, Not of Blood but of Time Writer and poet Aaron Abeyta contemplates ancestral guidance and protection in this excerpt from the Kinship book series. WORDS BY AARON A. ABEYTA
None of us remember a time before her. She had with her three spirits we could not see or feel or imagine; they were with her, the shaman said, to protect her. “Shall I send them away?” “Only if they are ready.” “They are. Finally.”
I
AM WRITING in front of the church— parked here in the first rays of morning sun—that, many years ago, my abuelita and I would attend, every day for morning mass. Most days we would make the short pilgrimage, five blocks on foot, where I would sit by her side, impatient, lost in
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the Spanish voices, their whispered and fervent cadence like a trance, a portal to some communion that neither of us could see but understood nonetheless. Her home on the edge of town bordered an irrigation ditch I would play in as a boy; it flowed east, out of Antonito, toward the distant Sangre
