The Kumkuat Korner

When I was a kid, my summers would be spent in Mexico with my mother's family. I would stay at my grandparents home and we'd spend endless days spending with my aunts and cousins. My mother is the youngest out of six sibling s, you see, and the eldest is my Aunt Sylvia who pretty much lived to her title as the big sister, the ring leader, the head honcho, whatever you want to call it, she was it.  Now my Aunt Gaby, the fourth sibling, always invited the whole family over to her house. It wasn't mandatory for my Aunt to do this big meal for the whole 30 of us (very close aunts, uncles, grandparents, nieces and nephews) since, every weekend my aunts, Sylvia, Lupe, Gaby, and Yasmin, (sometimes my grandma too) would alternate, so the cooking wouldn't fall onto a specific relative, but it was my Aunt Gaby’s house that I remembered the most fondly. My uncle, a tall and kind man of a few words, was a truck driver, and he had more tha...

The life I remember from many years ago is still picture clear in my mind. The endless days of watching such as Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Animal Planet (the list could go on). On school days, I would be practicing my talent to look busy and when my eyeballs weren't glued to the television, I would hide myself from everyone and play with my imaginary friends, entering a world of witches and princesses previously seen in dramatic Disney movies. My efforts to go unseen were always short lived because of major interruptions such as my mother yelling at me for trying to skip my chores. Whoops! With in time, things changed unknowingly. Before there was no one who could have made me really read books.   I hated reading .  No way, no how, could anyone ever make me read a real chapter book.   I preferred picture books, like the ones on the second floor of the old Public Library, under the children section where one can always find mothers with their infants...