El Nino

One bright morning Pepe sat in his wooden high chair spooning his oatmeal as usual into his round face. Maria, his mother, was making broth at the stove and singing happily. She turned to admire her dear boy. “Peppito,” she crooned, “mi Niño.”

It was a beautiful day. Outside the window, Maria could hear some shaker parrots chattering as they flitted about building a branchy nest in the church tower in the nearby square. A bluebird flew down to the window, landed on the sill, and cocked its head at her as if to ask some question.

Mauricio, the old mailman, had just turned his new aluminum cart into her front walk and was approaching the door. The leather mailbag it carried had grown too heavy upon his shoulder a few months ago, and his arthritis was flaring. It had been a wonderful thing when Luz, his postmistress, had presented him with the new aluminum cart to ease his burden—the first mailcart in his district. Mauricio had resisted at first, from pride. “Oh, but they’re using them everywhere in the big cities now,” his fellow workers had assured him. And he had gratefully relented. His co-workers had clapped as he took the handle and pushed it back and forth at the small ceremony. Since he had begun using the new cart, a smile had returned to replace the former grimace of pain as he made his rounds with a new lightness in his step, easily rolling and steering the cart before him.

Paco, the family toy Shnauzer, had been resting his head on his paws under the kitchen table, his designated ambush redoubt, when he sensed Mauricio’s approach as soon as the cart turned onto the walk. The sentinel sprang to his legs from his rest, on and skittered across the tile floor, his salt and pepper body of fluff charging toward the front door. “Brroo—roof-roof!” he barked excitedly and leaped to scratch the worn wood. But his leap was suddenly stopped in midair. “Roo-- .” Paco hung suspended, a small furry sculpture of thwarted fury and purpose unfulfilled.

In the pan before her, Maria saw the simmering broth just as suddenly stop in midboil. She whirled around to her darling boy.

“Peppito, what’s wrong?” she cried, rushing to snatch him up to her shoulder. In the middle of the child’s considerable baby head his coal-black eyes bulged beseechingly upward to his mother for aid. His pumpkin cheeks puffed out to his ears in a rainbow of pallid pinks and reds, then yellows, then blues, then purples, until it seemed they would burst. “Oh, my baby, my sweet, darling boy!” Maria swooped the child to her shoulder in one motion and began to pat his back vigorously and shake him gently up and down as she swayed from side to side. “There, there, you ate your oatmeal too fast, you naughty child,” she scolded. “Now just see what you have done! Oh, dear! Oh dear!”

Paco’s left paw had stopped just inches from the inside of the door, where it remained, while on its outside, only a few more inches from Paco’s slathering, bared little teeth, Mauricio’s bony right fingers clutched the day’s letters aloft in a graceful tableau as his left held the mailbox lid upright to receive them. In the nearby square the shaker parrots hung silently in orbit like hummingbirds around the old church tower in the square, and the bluebird cocked its head quizzically looking in at the scene like a beautiful, stuffed Christmas ornament. All the world was frozen in time as Mother Maria stroked and patted, bobbed and cooed her little Peppito.

And finally, with a heave of his little chest, the multicolored child let out the loudest, longest “Burrraaappp!” of which any child had ever relieved himself.

“There, there,” Maria cooed, “There’s my good boy!”

When the baby finished, his little body with its huge head seemingly beginning to return to normal proportions, a deep sigh and long yawn ensued, and he fell fast asleep in the comfort of his mother’s gently rocking, soft, warm embrace.

Mauricio dropped the letters into the box and quietly smiled under his gray mustache to hear Paco’s little cannonball body fly into the door on the other side harmlessly with a muffled thump and scratch its snare drum roll of flying paws , growling and barking. The doorbell chimed from Mauricio’s pressing, and the broth on Maria’s stove resumed its soft gurgling. The shaker parrots spun noisily again about the church tower in the square, and the little bluebird on the windowsill flew up to a cherry tree bough, hopped to face the idyllic cottage, then cheeped to confirm that all the world could continue its wondrous song.