A summer evening festival, a blur of white skipped past me in the under the string of lights,
dressed like it was her first communion or her wedding day.
But she was only 6 years old and so was I.
And I stopped her for the most important of reasons,
“You’ve got sugar on your face!” I said.
Stopping, she looked me and right in the eye and then said something of grave importance.
I didn’t understand her.
Her voice was Portuguese,
familiar but just out of reach.
A lullaby language, words my mother and aunts used, but not as items I could understand.
They were just sounds, as familiar and as foreign as the Festa, or festival,
the same kind they had multiple times of year.
There is a Christmas kind of gathering,
and one for Easter,
and one where they parade a statue,
and one where they cover the streets with flower petals,
and one where you wait in the hot sun to share soup sitting on picnic tables.
But most every festival had malassadas (“under-cooked”) also known as fried dough.
Our grandmothers wouldn’t make it at home, at least not MY Vovo.
She saved her dough for Massa Sovada, fresh every week,
for the family to eat for dessert with butter.
Grown-ups were even harder to understand than Portuguese words,
but butter seemed like an adult’s version of sugar; a coating for the basics.
I put my hand to my cheek and then- so did she.
It was like looking into a mirror.
She brushed her cheek and said something else.
“Obrigada,” she said in Portuguese and then “Thank you,” with an accent I wished I had.
And then she skipped off, comfortable in two languages, with a little less sugar on her face.
And left me standing, alone.
