oranges by gary soto

In Sicily, destiny passes by when you are a child, often announced by a dream. A dream that must be told, precisely, to your mother, before the day breaks and the first light of dawn erases its memory. If the dream is good, your mother will give you a piece of bread to eat immediately, to make that dream come true. If the dream is bad, your mother will make you spit on the ground three times, to dispel the ominous premonition. Belinda's destiny announced itself one day when she was just a child. She had not yet learned to read or write, yet she began to write poems, to create rhymes. They were very long poems, full of images and words that she herself struggled to understand. She wrote them on every piece of paper she found: on the back of receipts, on old school notebooks. She drew shapes and symbols that only she could decipher. She was a singular child, she had a strong personality and spoke a lot, "tutto d'un fiato" (all in one breath), and her hair, red like fire, reflected her fiery and impulsive character. But she was also a dreamer and loved to look at the stars at night and lie down in the grass to watch the clouds chasing each other in the sky, imagining they were animals or people. One day she showed her poems to her mother, Caterina. Her mother, usually busy with a thousand chores, stopped to listen to her. Caterina was a practical and rational woman, not at all inclined to listen to dreams or strange stories. She was always focused on facts, on work, on caring for her family and her two children. She spent her days between the sewing machine, creating beautiful clothes, and the kitchen, where she prepared delicious dishes for everyone. Yet, that day, she listened to Belinda intently, with a serious face. Perhaps she sensed in her daughter's poems the same power, the same "current" that flowed within her own mother, Belinda's grandmother, the "mavara" (witch) who guarded the ancient secrets of the earth. Caterina listened to the words, then looked at her daughter and said: “A mamma non si cunta u distinu!” (You don't tell destiny to Mom!). She looked at Belinda with eyes full of fear, then hugged her tightly and told her not to show those papers to anyone, and above all, not to tell anyone what she felt, not even her best friend. Not even her father, who, if he had found out, would have made a scene and then, like the good Christian he was, would have taken her to exorcise the devil. Belinda had not understood much, but she knew that those words of her mother were a warning, a sign that she should hide those secrets well, far from the eyes of others. And so she did. For many years, Belinda kept those poems, those images, those symbols, locked away in her heart, silencing that inner voice, that powerful call that tried to emerge from her soul, like a river in flood. She tried to live a normal life, a life like that of other girls, but that force, that "current," that invisible river, continued to flow within her. It was destiny, and destiny cannot be stopped.