Maria's Childhood Memories as Told to Her Daughter: Part Two

I don't remember much about my father's side of the family. I don't even know my paternal grandparents' names. I never knew my father's father. He died before I was born. My grandmother, on my father's side, lived so close to the ocean that fish would swim into the house when there were storms. There was a gap between the wooden door and the dirt door sill where the fish would slip in during the storms. The little house had dirt floors that were always wet.

I know that when we walked to my grandmother's house for a visit, we passed what they called "the whale factory." Sometimes dead whales would line the beach. Men worked on ladders to reach the upper parts of the whales which were bigger than the house where I lived. The sand under my feet was the color of pine. Just yards from my path, the sands were crimson with the blood of whales. It has been more than fifty years, and I can still smell the foul stench.

My maternal grandmother was christened Estrella Lima. In Portuguese, Estrella means star, not like a movie star, or a television star. Those didn't exist in 1890, the year she was born. Estrella was named after the stars that shone in the sky over the Atlantic Ocean on the night she was thrust into this world.

My grandfather, Julio Cabral, was born in Brazil in 1880. Theirs was an arranged marriage when he was 26, and she was just 16.

Soon after their wedding in 1906, they moved to the United States. They rented a lovely farm in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. It was a dream come true. They kept sheep, chickens, pigs, many cows, and one horse named Jaime Q. Eventually there were four children, three girls and a boy. The children all worked in the fields as soon as they were able. My grandfather would joke that he knew the children carried heavy loads, but they surely made his load lighter.

All that hard work paid off. Soon, my grandfather was so wealthy that his friends and neighbors nicknamed him "Mr. Dollar." Still, he, his wife, and their four children worked in the fields and milked the cows.