Green Chile

I prefer red chile over my eggs and potatoes for breakfast. Red chile ristras decorate my door, dry on my roof, and hang from eaves. They lend open-air vegetable stands historical grandeur, and gently swing with an air of festive welcome. I can hear them talking in the wind, haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping tongues of old men, licking the breeze. But grandmother loves green chile. When I visit her, she holds the green chile pepper in her wrinkled hands. Ah, voluptuous, masculine, an air of authority and youth simmers from its swan-neck stem, tapering to a flowery collar, fermenting resinous spice. A well-dressed gentleman at the door my grandmother takes sensuously in her hand, rubbing its firm glossed sides, caressing the oily rubbery serpent, with mouth -watering fulfillment, fondling its curves with gentle fingers. Its bearing magnificent and taut as flanks of a tiger in mid-leap, she thrusts her blade into and cuts it open, with lust on her hot mouth, sweating over the stove, bandanna round her forehead, mysterious passion on her face as she serves me green chile con carne between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas, with beans and rice–her sacrifice to here little prince. I slurp form my plate with last bit of tortilla, my mouth burns and I hiss and drink a tall glass of cold water. All over New Mexico, sunburned men and women drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny sacks of green chile, from Belen, Beguita, Wllard, Estancia, San Antonio y Socorro, from fields to roadside stands, you see them roasting green chile in screen-sided homemade barrels, and for a dollar a bag, we relive this old, beautiful ritual again and again.