Every now and then when you were a kid you'd sleep over at your Grandma Basquez's house. You got to sleep in your mom's childhood bedroom, snuggle under her old comforter and fall asleep to the paper stars your mom had made years and years ago when she was in primary school.
It was always special, those nights you spent with Grandma Basquez, or Lita Maria, as you called her most of the time. It's not that you didn't love your other grandparents, Grandma and Grandpa Stewart, but you had a special relationship with Lita Maria. She understood you, without you ever having to say anything or explain.
She saw how curious you were, how much you loved to investigate and explore. She's the one who pulled down your late grandfather's big travel trunk from the attic, and dug up his old microscope and the collection of slides in there. Abuelito was a scientist, a botanist, she told you as she showed you how to adjust the lens, how to explore parts of the world you'd never been able to imagine before this.
In the summer you spent as much time as possible with Lita Maria, digging around in the big back-yard gardens. Taking samples of leaves and stems, flower petals, berries, slivers of carrot and onion. All to put under the lens of your microscope and see what you could discover.
Once you found a butterfly with a broken wing sitting on the wide leaf of a tomato plant. When you called Lita Maria over, her big rubber gardening galoshes clomping over through the dirt, she held it in her hands so gently you thought for a moment that maybe there was some miracle she could perform to make it better.
But instead she told you to gather up some twigs and grass and leaves, and went into the gardening shed in the corner of the yard. There, inside the little room, she pulled down an old mason jar and told you to make the butterfly a habitat to call his own. And then she gently, gently slipped the little creature inside, and fit the cover of the jar over a screen of wire mesh. So he'd have enough air, she'd said.
The two of you kept watch over that butterfly—Hank, you called him—for the next week or so, and when he passed away, you'd cried while Lita Maria held you close.
It was the first time you'd ever known death.
After she wiped your tears, she asked you if you were ready to learn the butterfly's gift. And when you nodded, she gently put Hank's tiny body on a white sheet of paper and brought out her big magnifying glass, the one she used to help her see when she embroidered in the evenings after dinner.
You took that magnifying glass and held it over his body, fascinated at the way his wings shimmered under the light.
And you felt better.
Hank wasn't your first autopsy, he was just the first living thing you mourned for, and the first whose death inspired you to know more.
After that, you collected bugs whenever and wherever you could find them. Lita Maria would call you to come over when she'd caught a centipede in the house, or a June bug on the porch. And then she'd help you pin and mount them, help you examine them. Help you satisfy your never-ending desire just to know.
All your life, she's helped you discover the answers to your questions.
And so when you graduate from med school at the top of your class, and the dean asks you to give a brief speech, you spend your five minutes thanking her. Telling the whole auditorium about Lita Maria, and the gift she gave you so long ago. Not just the microscope, not just her time and love and support.
But the freedom to ask questions and to explore for answers. No matter what anyone else thought. No matter what anyone else expected you to do, no matter what anyone else said you couldn't.
There's a story you need to tell, a story you need your classmates to understand as they prepare to go out into the world as doctors, as community members, as parents.
"Holly," you remember your mother saying once, as mothers do, "get out of the mud, you're getting dirty."
You scan the crowd, looking for Lita Maria sitting there between your parents, and you smile.
You remember how your grandmother had scolded your mother, her daughter.
"My abuelita," you tell them all, "said to my mother, 'Leave the girl alone, Sabela, sometimes you have to get a little dirty to discover something new.'"