Stephany Reyes

Watching soldiers fall from the sky

Posted

I lay on my back in the tiny concrete courtyard of my childhood home in El Salvador, in the cool shade cast by long tin panels that extended from the roof. A few times a week at around noon, planes flew over our neighborhood, and I always watched them.

It was the early 1990s. I must have been 5 or 6 years old.

I would extend my hand to the sky, pretending to pick the cotton candy clouds, imagining the sugary sweetness melting on my tongue. We didn’t have money to buy sweets. Cotton candy was a big treat.

To me the planes were like so many gray plastic toys filling the sky. They spewed out soldiers — paratroopers — on training missions. They were preparing for another potential civil war, after one had broken out in the mid-1980s between the military-led government and a coalition of guerilla groups. I asked my mom about it years later. We were thankful that a second civil war never happened.

In America, we take for granted the idea of a safe backyard, with grass, trees, maybe a white picket fence. We don’t think of our yards as potential training grounds for war. I was born in the U.S. My parents had fled the civil war. When I was 6 months old, my family returned to El Salvador. Then we moved back to the U.S. for good when I was 7.

But I will never forget whiling away those hours in my backyard. With one eye closed, I would reach up and cup my hand underneath one toy soldier after another to save them from splattering in the fields below. So fragile, I thought. Within seconds, their parachutes would shoot open and yank them upward violently. Then I’d fold my arms behind my head, leaving them to float down on their own, without my help.

I’d watch them all trickle down from the sky until they eventually disappeared from view behind the concrete wall boxing in our small house from the neighbors’ yards. A bright green iguana might grasp the gray wall. At its base was a small bed of pink and white flowers that my mother planted to add color to our otherwise dull backyard.

Aside from the flowers, there was no vegetation. No grass, no trees, no bushes, not even any weeds. Just concrete, surrounded by concrete walls. But it was our little slice of playground nonetheless, and my older sister Nilsen and I made the most of it.

We made the most of it when my mother hosted her religious gatherings at our home. She invited the neighborhood children and friends to read and praise the Bible, but we kids always wandered out to the backyard to escape the prayers. We drew chalk boxes on the ground and hopped on one foot in each box. We played tag and tired ourselves out under the hot sun.

Our fun was always abruptly cut short when my mother decided that it was time for us to come back into the house, sit in a circle and talk about Jesus. We whined and protested, but each time she knew how to reel us in.

“El chocolate esta listo,” she would say. The chocolate was ready. The blistering Central American heat never discouraged my mother from making hot chocolate. It was the best part of the gatherings. Off to the backyard we went once more, spilling a trail of homemade sweetness on the concrete, which always led my mother to wherever we were hiding.

Not long before our big move back to America in 1998, my mother followed a trend that was quickly spreading from one backyard to the next. She installed metal bars that reached from the top of the concrete walls to the roof of the house, in order to protect us from thieves who might try to climb the walls and drop down into the yard. Many years later, I found out that she was increasing the value of our property before we sold it and permanently said goodbye.

The bars partially blocked my view of the clouds for the remainder of my life in El Salvador. On a sunny day in late November 1998, I once again lay on my back on the concrete ground and counted the planes in the sky. I caught two or three soldiers that I could see between the bars in my outstretched hand, then watched each one disappear, hoping that I’d saved them.

That December, we moved to New York. I haven’t seen toy soldiers fall from the sky since.
 
Stephany Reyes is the editor of the East Meadow Herald. Comments about this column? Sreyes@liherald.com.