My Holiday Essay 150 Words

[Chanelle Glugla]

Everytime I come across the smell of carne guisada, my mind runs immediately back to my childhood, and some of the most vivid memories of my early life pop up, arousing a feeling of nostalgic joy. I was six years old when my parents announced that me, together with my sisters Ashley and Kayla, would have visited our great-grandparents in Puerto Rico during the summer holidays. Abuela, our grandmother, would have accompanied us.

The three following months were full of excitement, planning, and daydreams. Besides the official programming, led unequivocally by mom and grandmother, there was a lot of underground conspiracy among the three of us: one of our main concerns was how to smuggle a couple of puppets in the suitcase, and we spent hours fantasizing about adventurous meeting with the animals of the forest.

When the day of departure finally arrived, I realized that what I had always pretended to ignore would have become a reality for the following two weeks: mom would not have come with us! However, there was no time to recriminate, cry, or play up, as grandma took the lead, and in a blink of an eye, we found ourselves safely anchored to the seats of the aircraft. It was my first flight, and when the plane started to roll I was terrified, but during the take-off, grandma held my hand tight, and everything went right.

When the aircraft reached the optimal navigation altitude, it was pure bliss: Ashley, Kayla and I huddled on the window trying to guess where we were flying over. We were a bit loud too, and I suspect that the old couple sitting in front of got annoyed because of our chattering, screaming, and singing. After some hours, we landed safely at the international airport of Saint Juan, where our great-grandparents were waiting for us.

Our great-grandparents lived in a small village at about two hours by bus from the city, not so far from Guayanilla, a renowned seaside resort. The news of our arrival had already spread, and the whole village had gathered to welcome us, bringing cakes, candies, and fresh fruit juices. Indeed, it looked a Caribbean ideal of paradise, at least until grandma shouted that it was time for us to have a bath and some rest after the flight and the bus trip. Besides playing with the other kids and exploring the village, the days were marked by several farming activities, and we helped to take care of the garden and the animals. I loved to feed the chickens: it was a noisy and chaotic task, and the chickens were a bit clumsy and ridiculous.

At home, it was a lot of chattering between Mima and grandma, while Pipa was silent for most of the time. When he spoke, it was always to say something funny, though not always appreciated by Mima, who never missed a chance to reproach him. However, it looked as they were playing a used game, and the affection that united them was evident. My sisters and I discovered that we had flocks of first, second, and even third cousins. You might say that the village was a large family. I made friend with Ivelisse, the daughter of a second cousin of grandma. Together, we rode horses and went to the seaside almost every day. We are still in touch, and Ivelisse visited me two years ago.

Perhaps, the most exciting day of the whole holiday was the trip to El Yunque National Forest. El Yunque is a vast rain forest in the northeast of Puerto Rico. It took some hours by bus to reach the park, but the experience was rewarding from every perspective. The vegetation was luxuriant, and I could feel the energy coming from the depth of the forest. We could hear several verses of animals, and we were so lucky to see a couple of curious green parrots peeping from a tree. The goal of the visit was a waterfall in the middle of the forest, the Coca waterfall. Breathtaking is the only word I can use to describe the magnificence, the magic, and the dramatic beauty of that spot. Even today, if I close my eyes, I can still see the Coca waterfall in all its greatness, hear the pouring water, and the power of Mother Nature.

However, all things must pass, and our two-week holidays came to an end, and on one sunny day we made our way back to Saint Juan and flew back home. That trip to Puerto Rico was my first long journey, moreover without parents. I will always regard that small village near Guayanilla as a second home, where my sisters and I spent many happy days, pampered by the warmth of the ocean, the reassuring smell of the horses, and the unconditioned love of Mima and Pipa.

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I am shivering, reading cold northeastern prose

and there is a word for what I do

but I do it anyway,

carefully setting dinner on the table uncooked,

before setting the table on fire.

We drive through towns where the tallest building is the Catholic church and the main street downtown is five storefronts lined up in a row. Two of them are always dispensaries, somehow. All these Catholics must be smoking weed.

My mother grew up on the military base next to town. My grandfather worked on the planes and never flew them. He cleaned floors and toilets at night. He drank too much and had a beautiful singing voice, warbling and sad, full to bursting with everything that had happened to him. This is what I am. I belong to it all.

In the car after Christmas I make a joke to my dad about wanting to kill myself. I really am joking, and he laughs, and I feel guilty anyway. Recently, he told me that he was so worried about me a few months ago that he almost got on a flight to New York.

When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.

Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.

Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.

A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.

i'm left kind of shattered at how much this resonated with me. the colorlessness of south Ontario, anger and grief, and the mourning we are swept up in by the waves of love, wherever it finds us. Love is being seen, I feel, and I grieve knowing the world must close its eyes. thank you, your words have helped me feel seen again.

All-timer David Berman framing your piece that so precisely describes everything I've been moving through after a visit to my rust belt hometown, so beautifully singular yet somehow feels like reading out of my own diary-- thank you for the catharsis

Nobody takes care of southern Ontario.1 On the drive from my parent\u2019s house to the hospital \u2014 a two-hour stretch of deep suburban highway we\u2019ve driven hundreds of times in my life, for hundreds of reasons \u2014 this is the only thing I can think about, again and again. Nobody takes care of anything here.

In Mark Fisher\u2019s The Weird and the Eerie, he theorizes that the feeling of eerie is formed from absence; eerieness is conjured \u201Ceither when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present where there should be something.\u201D Ontario, too, is defined by absence: acres of empty farmland, dead or dying; an occasional horse with no stable, brushing off flies; abandoned barns, their rotted roofs slumping into them like bedsheets, black with mildew and so eaten-through that you can see pockets of sky peeking through from the other side of the wooden slats.

Ontario in the winter is a province in greyscale. It\u2019s the kind of grey that takes something from you; you are less of yourself for being surrounded by it. There are stretches of the road that make you colourblind \u2014 you\u2019re left desperate for stimulation, reaching for the abstract idea of colour in the forgotten past or distant future (maybe one of these barns used to be red, you think, before the rot). And then, just when you\u2019re sure you\u2019ll never see anything but grey ever again in your life, you see a glimpse of a blue car or a bright yellow billboard that says JESUS SAVES. It never makes you feel better; mostly it just serves to remind you that there is theoretical colour in the world, far away, kept from you. Someone in this place must have stolen some colour from somewhere it naturally grows and transplanted it here, in its ugliest possible form, for no reason other than to torture us. Then the blue car drives out of your field of view and you\u2019re colourblind again.

One year, we were driving down this stretch of road and saw one of the abandoned barns engulfed in flames. The fire was two stories high, hypnotic in its efficiency, made fiercer and brighter and hotter by the flat monotony of the landscape around it. It was the most viscerally destructive thing I had ever seen in real life, and this is the part that really put a pit in my stomach: all this sound and fury, and it wasn\u2019t destroying anything that anyone had cared about for a long, long time.

In Ontario, I am a child again. Don\u2019t tell me what to do. When you\u2019re a nail, everything looks like a hammer; when you\u2019re a child, everything sounds like derision. I have made myself so small in my mind that I can only ever be looked down upon. This is my worst trick.

We go to the church where my parents got married. We go to the house where my grandparents died. We check on if the new family is taking good care of it \u2014 they are, we determine, although it\u2019s hard to know by what metric. I\u2019m sure the new family doesn\u2019t chainsmoke in the kitchen with the radio on. Maybe they washed the nicotine out of the walls. Maybe they don\u2019t let the kids sit so close to the high-static television. What a prison, to take such good care of a house so carefully and lovingly ruined \u2014 what a tragedy, what a loss.

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