The gingerbread woman reappeared when I opened some boxes of ornaments this weekend. I wanted to do a little light-handed decorating, at least in my kitchen window, my hearth. I pulled back the tissue paper wrapped around her plump little body, saw who it was, and tenderly wrapped her back up, deciding against that trip down memory lane. Then I found the little wreath I’d hung to frame her years before, and my hands decided to go back after all, back to the time when she meant something real to me.
I’d written about this cheerful
kitchen angel in this column, so I dug up the piece from the notebooks where
I’d once kept them organized. What I discovered when I re-read it surprised
me. In the first week of Jan., 2011, I
was still in love with my community, tender toward its complexities, not yet tortured
by them. It felt good to remember.
The gingerbread woman reverie was
triggered by community pain I was just coming to know thanks to my new job at
RN Market. A much loved woman, Inglatina
Huerta, had been killed on her way to work around 5 a.m. on New Year’s Eve
Day. She had a head-on collision with
the son of one of Lindsay’s first families, who was coming home from a party.
The story I heard is that he was not tested for alcohol. An Hispanic woman on her way to work, killed
by a white boy on his way home from a party and not made to bear any
consequences: it was an old story that could have happened anywhere. People suffered in silence. That’s how we do it here.
People had just begun to not suffer
in silence two months before, when the revelations about high salaries
Lindsay’s top employees were being paid splattered against the reality that a
high percentage of the town’s residents have trouble paying their water
bills. In mid-October 2010 about a
thousand people met in the high school gymnasium for a highly-guarded city
council meeting, purportedly to hear their complaints. At first I was reluctant to get involved, so
I simply wrote about it. The first
families fought back. In the columns
before the gingerbread woman, I was just beginning to feel the effect of moving
socially from one side of the community to the other, and still holding some
middle ground.
That was before the housing fiascos
were revealed, and before the effects of Rich Wilkinson’s appointment to city
manager could be accumulated. It was
before coming to the podium during public comment period at city council
meetings and discovering we had to fight for the right to speak, before the
plan to demolish the Citrus Exchange building, and before the lawsuits we filed
to try to keep that from happening. Back
then I was afraid of losing my sense of home in this town through the act of
protesting. I didn’t know that loss would occur inside of me.
“It’s just love,” the gingerbread
woman had told me about Inglatina’s accident and all the pain and silent
discord that followed. “Grief is the
price we pay for love,” I’d quoted a fellow Quaker then. It’s hard to remember. But as we, against the dark, deck our homes
with the lights of life and share our wonder about a birth on the wrong side of
the tracks in Bethlehem 2017+ years ago, maybe perspective will
come. All this fighting is just about
love for a little town.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy
Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.
You can send her your ornament stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA
93247 or leave a
comment below.
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