One week ago I was on the back of a pick-up that usually transports cows with my family traveling to what seemed like the tip of the earth. So high up that it seems like I could just reach out and touch the clouds that encircle El Yunque, Puerto Rico's amazing rainforest. There in Rio Abajo, Ceiba, (or was is Chupacallos as my iPhone indicated?) we spun around in awe, my children, my parents, and I. Amazed and mesmerized at the beauty of this remote spot that once held the scrappy wooden house that my Great-Grandmother, my Bisabuela Luisa raised her family, where my grandmother grew up walking down to small river to get water, carrying it back on her head...the place that my father spent the first three years of his life. It was an experience that will be etched in my mind and my heart forever. Although the house no longer stands its ghost was ever present in the space. For a brief moment we were all transported to another time full of the spirits of those who came before without whom we would not exist. It is experiences like this that make this ancestry journey come to life and create new quests for more information. The view will take the breath away of anyone who sees it yet still I wonder how it is that my ancestors ever looked up from the shore and thought it was a good idea to travel to the tip of of the mountain through the thickets of trees and vegetation to make a home just below the clouds.
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August 2019
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