Song of the Mockingbird: My Journey with Josefina

I tell Josefina I’m up for an expedition, trying to sound brave. I follow her through the courtyard to a dim room at the back of the house. It’s cool and shadowy, like the cave where I found the flute, but it holds different treasures. A wooden loom stands in the room, white yarn stretched taut across the top and fanning out like a spider’s web. Blue strands are woven halfway up. Bright hanks of wool hang from pegs on the walls: yellow, blue, gray, and black. It’s a whole room just for weaving.

In the corner, Teresita kneels at another loom hung on the wall, two heavy beams suspended from the ceiling and a third hanging near the floor. She passes a small ball of gray yarn through white strands and presses it down over the row she’s already woven, working on a blanket with a zigzag pattern in black and red.

Teresita says there should be plenty of rabbit-brush flowers in the hills, since they make a yellow dye, and gestures to the yellow wool hanging on the wall. Josefina insists we can find some.

A short while later, we leave the house with a basket under my arm, just like Josefina, my flute tucked into a leather pouch at my waist, just like hers. She pulls her shawl over her head in one fluid moment and looks at me to do the same. When she asks if I should pull my borrowed rebozo up over my head, too, I say I’m good, then catch the surprise on her face. Wrong answer. I pull the silky shawl over my head.

Sombrita decides to come along, bounding ahead on her spring-like legs, while Miguel follows behind with another basket over his arm. I ask Josefina if Miguel is also collecting rabbit-brush, and she giggles. He’s coming with us as a chaperone and guardian.

As we climb into the rising hills behind the house, I turn this over. I guess Josefina and her sisters don’t go out without someone watching them, and that makes sense, especially since I was almost captured myself. I shiver, wondering just how dangerous this world really is.