Nested in the cleavage formed by the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains,
eight miles from the ocean that, when feeling beneficent, air-mails her breakfast
fog to every gasping inland garden, lies the Salinas Valley.
The Valley, slapped flat and smelling like the last dollar bet in a gas station poker game,
has long been called the Salad Bowl of the World for its green-gold harvests.
Grasshoppers and blister beetles and Bagrada bugs be damned.
Entering the valley, drop down below the pelvic Y, where California 68 meets U.S. 101.
Drive past Denny’s and the thrift stores and the squatting pink buildings that advertise
llantas y llamparas and a discount on a newly painted, totally refurbished, made in Mexico
American dream (batteries not included). Cross over Memory Drive, turn on Abbott and,
in less than a thousand feet, you will arrive at the beautiful green and brown muddle
known as the Garden of Memories “*Cemetery Crematory Mausoleum. Established in 1860.”
The place is an eclectic gathering of souls: 48 Rodríguezes, 33 Jones, 13 Bells, 60 Martinezes,
2 Chans, 2 Changs, and a kindly old man named Ying Wun. If you want to visit someone named
Abe, Higashi, Hirozawa, or Ikeda, however, best cross over to Yamata’s Japanese burial
grounds. Internment and interment are far too similar in the grand and painful scheme of things.
Enjoy the Cyprus trees and the colorful flyers for the Dia De Los Muertos Festival (Holy Mass
at 12:30). Ignore the Health Gard/Human Corpse Waste Management Drains.
The Garden of Memories closes a half hour before dusk, but real cemetery life begins
when the fireflies light the angel’s eyes and guide the ghosts to their closest friends. Umberto
Rodrigo tells of the day he gave a drink of water to César Chávez.
That sullen white man curses burning books and drinks a toast to someone named Joad.
In the children’s section, Baby Eva, Tibi Trujillo and little Judith Lee play and run and shriek
with joy. Then, fading in the dawn, they lied down in three feet of rich Salinas soil and sleep.
Ann Marie Potter recently graduated from a PhD program in fiction at Oklahoma State University while enjoying her first year in the beautiful state of Wyoming. Her poetry has been published in The Storyteller, Thirteen Myna Birds and Velvet Antler.
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