A woman named for one month,
born in another

I was born Abril — Spanish for April — and my birth month is June. I like to think I’ve been keeping calendar-time poetry my whole life without noticing.

The first eleven years of my life happened on a ranch in Mexico: a colorful adobe house with dirt floors and a leaky roof, my grandmother Victoria’s unhurried rhythms, and my grandfather teaching me to read and write at a wobbly little desk beside his napping bed, starting when I was two and a half. When thunder came, we placed buckets. When the day came, she made everything from nothing. I didn’t know we were poor; I knew we were loved.

At eleven, my sister and I came to America with our family, speaking no English at all. I learned it in a year, carried everywhere by a green dictionary so worn its pages were held together by a few strings and faith. I went on to become the first in my family to graduate college, built a career in Finance and Accounting, and married Cecil — my study partner turned biggest supporter. Together, with our two mini schnauzers along for the adventure, we spent three years in Germany, where Europe quietly taught me the unhurried life I’d first known in my grandmother’s kitchen.

Then we came home to Texas — and to the two children who made me Mama. Paris & June was already alive through all of this: it was born back in 2016, before any of our crossings, from one word God gave me in a dream — Write. What Texas and motherhood gave the site was its truest purpose, when I made the decision I wrote about in the essay that reshaped everything— trading a corporate title for the only one that ever mattered.

Each chapter of this story deserves its own essay, and each will get one. The rhythms my grandmother kept already have theirs — Rhythms, Not Schedules — and the green dictionary’s is coming. Three generations of women made the road that leads to this kitchen, and I intend to write all three.

Con amor y gratitud, siempre — Abril