Days from My Childhood

I mentioned I come from a family of 16; ten boys and six girls, these are the ones that made it to adulthood; my parents actually had 21 in all. I never met the other five children; they passed before I was born. I got to grow up with the best family. I enjoyed watching my brother’s haul hay or drive diesel trucks for my dad’s company, Fred Espinoza and Son’s Trucking Co., with loads of watermelons or peaches onto our ranch, I would climb on the back of those trailers as quick as any barefooted little redheaded country girl could and eat a summer peach. We would eat so many watermelons till our hands and faces were so sticky from all the juice, our fingers would stick together. I can still remember my sisters preparing the evening meal for when the men came home; it was a time of excitement for me because I knew if I stayed close I would get a hot tortilla freshly made and smothered in butter. Ours was a very old fashioned way of dinnertime, because there were many of us, the men would eat first, then the women and children. But we never complained that was just the way things were.

Our homes were always big some even had 2 story guest houses so we could all fit. After I grew up my sister Olga and I were at the swap meet in Phoenix, talking to people we just met and they mentioned they were from Modesto, California, we said, “Us, too”. We told them where we lived and they responded with “Oh!, The house with all the adopted kids?” How we laughed.