Summer to Fall in Love?

"Any season is good for love," says Delia, an 83-year-old woman who fell in love during the coldest winter she can remember:

"We met in the middle of the harvest, around Perico, where my paternal grandparents lived, it was a different time, I had already been in a five-year relation with a boyfriend who had been chosen for me in the family of my brothers-in-law, we were three sisters, I was the youngest and the only one who was yet to get married, but no way, when I saw that peasant, full of sweat and all, dark-haired, and with asian features around the eyes that look like smiling all the time... my heart lipped faster". I coudn’t sleep that night and my dad I think he couldn’t sleep for weeks, but hey, he forgave me, because in the end I was his pretty girl."

Then there was a wedding, party and four children. Later 9 grandsons and two granddaughters without the grandmother telling her secrets. Until finally, the youngest of the granddaughters, faced the grandmother in her eighteenth birthday and without the consent of her parents, she ended with her "highschool's boyfriend" and went to Varadero with a boy she met that same summer.

So Delia had to speak her mind and make it clear that it’s not summer, nor the beach, nor social networks, nor that this youth is lost, it’s love that comes and changes everything, no matter in what point of rotation is Earth.

Delia will never forget the first time  "el chino" improvised for her, without saying her name, because "the other", the chosen boyfriend, deserved respect (and his machete too, Delia jokingly notes):

such a beautiful girl
with spring lights
she made it winter outside
summer if I think about her...
My singing and commoner soul
Surrenders to her candor
of my morning the color
joy of my afternoon
at night a melody
to win her love

"If she recited the decima? No way, she sang them without standing up from her chair or dropping the needle and thread. Right there the argument ended and the shouting too, the whole "family" was silent to listen to her and well, you already know the rest, yesterday I returned to Varadero and here we are, half hidden, a little scared, but happy, if it's a "summer love", as my parents say, then let it be intense like the sun. a story like that of my grandparents? Nobody knows, but it's not like we're thinking about it either, we're living...", Lily, Delia's granddaughter, finished telling me while we were freshening up from the second ride on the roller coaster ride.

We had just met, but it was as if she, even reconciled to herself thanks to Grandma, needed to talk. Between so much heat and difficulties, summer brings love and experiences that alleviate and that are worth telling - living.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff