Mami's Magic

I dreamt about her last night. We were visiting a college I wanted to go to. I was younger, she was younger and we were happy and healthy.

Walking the campus, I noticed a water spigot that had been left running and was causing some water to pool in a parking lot. “Watch this,” I told my mom as I floated a few inches above the water to get to the spigot, never touching the ground. I floated all the way back to her and touched down with a smile. I expected her to be surprised, shocked, but instead my mom silently walked me into an empty auditorium, said, “Watch this,” and proceeded to rise from the ground and fly to the ceiling of this huge auditorium. I rose up next to her, going well beyond the few inches I’d thought were my flying limit. We flew together holding hands and laughing. When we touched back down, the room filled with people, and though I thought she was right behind me, when I left the room I realized I had left her behind. I found her hours later, asleep on the floor while people danced around the room. She was still joyful when she woke, rubbing the kink out of her neck.

I’ve always had vivid dreams and so did she. My childhood mornings were full of half remembered stories from her dreams. Things that didn’t make sense, fantastical plots, beasts, strange and sometimes scary visions she would share with us while making breakfast. My father would shake his head and laugh them off. And so would we, her daughters, as we grew older.

A dream of hers I heard about often in my childhood scared me more than a little. One morning, after a night of troubled sleep and vivid dreams, my Mami woke in the apartment in Arlington, Virginia, where she, my father, and two sisters lived, screaming about an earthquake. She got out of bed panicked, asking if everyone was ok. With wide eyes, my father had informed her that there had been no earthquake, not a tremor. She looked around the room and saw that nothing was out of place. In her dream, plates had fallen off of shelves, walls had cracked. My father laughed and wandered off—just another one my mom’s wild dreams.

The next day, a 7.5 magnitude earthquake hit Guatemala, 100 miles north of Guatemala City where my abuelita and Tia lived. They felt the earth shake and plates fell off the walls. Around the fault line, the earthquake triggered 10,000 landslides and there was severe loss of life.

That was the most extreme example of my mom’s “special powers” of premonition, but on a regular basis, a phone call from a friend she hadn’t heard from for years would be greeted with the saying, “la llame con mis pensamientos”, “I called you with my thoughts”. She would regularly know who was calling before she picked up the phone in the time before caller id. “Weird!” my sisters and I would say when she’d tell us how she hadn’t talked to a friend from Guate in five years but dreamt of her the night before and the friend called first thing the next morning. As I got older, she and I regularly exchanged this greeting when we’d call each other at exactly the same moment or her call came exactly when I was thinking of her.

And then there were the stories she’d tell us about the quetzal, the magnificent national bird of Guatemala. With its bright red chest, green plumage and long tail, its beauty is revered. Guatemala named its currency after the bird and it’s considered a sin to keep quetzals in confinement. My mom would tell how when the Spanish conquistadors came to fight the Quiche Indians for their land, the quetzals fought alongside the Quiche, blinding the conquistadors in battle by flying low and confusing them with their long tails. My Brazilian dad would laugh and say no wonder the Spanish ended up with all of Latin America except for Brazil if the native people only had tiny green birds to help them.

I recently looked up this last legend to see if there was any basis in truth for this tale. More than a few links mention the quetzal assisting the Quiche in fighting against the Spanish. Seeing her story validated on the internet makes me regret ever having doubted her stories. Her magic was part of our everyday life. Washing and stacking dishes in cupboards in our little house in the suburbs, she’d take us away to faraway places, testing the limits of reality. Her dreams, her visions, her stories all scared me when I was little, but she was teaching us how to fly – away from the ordinary, the struggle, to something beyond.

They were all part of her magic, and now they’re part of my story.

—Erika

Erika Lopez is a DC area native living in Charlotte, NC with her husband, two kids, and two fur babies. She is a mother, wife, non-profit consultant, wannabe writer, lover of food, travel, music, and words.