¡ Arroz !

Good morning...I am still writing about rice today because I realized yesterday after I posted that I had more to say. This time under the category of words.

That upside down exclamation point up there is made with Alt 173, in case you want to make one.  It is essential in Spanish orthography.

"Arroz" is rice in Spanish, and it is a word connected with one of my earliest memories.  In my memory, it is noon time, and I am alone with my baby sister in an upstairs room in a large house.  Rare that we would ever be left alone for long enough for me to note it.  I am standing in an airy shadowy room, and my baby sister is jumping up and down in her baby bed, crying out, "¡ Arroz,  arroz!"

That wonderful Mexican rice smell I mentioned yesterday is coming up the stairs and filling the house. Someone comes and we are taken to lunch, I guess. I must have been two and a half years old in this memory, as my nameless sister was probably a year old.  We all began to talk early in our family, and talk we did. I am grateful to my sister for this expression of anticipation, as it set this moment in my memory forever.  We moved a lot as kids after this, and had more sisters, but at this time we lived in a large graceful house in Brownsville, Texas.  My mother was pretty happy.  She had two maids, and two maids are better than one, if thay can get along.

The maids were named Lila (pronounced in the Spanish pronunciation) and Ambrosia....what beautiful names for two short dumpy  women.  Lila was bright and peppery as to temperament as became an excellent cook.  And Ambrosia was well named, a very sweet docile person who got along well with my mother and with Lila, a miracle in both cases.  We loved Ambrosia and enjoyed Lila, who was not ever entrusted with our care...but we saw her around. I remember both these ladies very well, as they both came to work on and off later on in our childhoods when we were not so well off as to live in a large cool house nor have two maids..

Why maids, you ask? Everyone had one if they were anyone at all.  In Brownsville I have even known maids who had maids, probably more of them than you'd think. Someone had to watch her kids while she was working.  A well-run household needs a maid.  In American culture, the wife is ideally the maid, which explains a lot of the unhappiness in our country.  I was never a maid, and am not one to this day, which probably explains much of my precarious  relationship with marriage.

When my father and mother married, he told her that she would always have a maid.  The priorities  in our household were these: 1) food and shelter, 2) a maid for my mother, 3) everything else.  My parents stuck to this model all their married life except for some years in my early childhood when the Depression struck South Texas with its bitter force and my mother and somebody and I went to live with our American grandparents in San Benito, while my father lived and worked in Mexico.

So you can see that rice encompasses a lot more of life than just being a comestible. Who cooks it, how it's cooked and appreciated, just opens a window to a life you might never have known.  When I decided yesterday to write this part of the rice story, I wondered for the first time, Say, how did rice come to Spain anyway?  Of course, it came via North Africa and those resourceful Moors who so plague our imaginations today.  But how did it get to North Africa? It has to grow in paddies, doesn't it? Actually, it does not have to grow underwater, though that was the culture developed for it in the East.  The answer is, our ancestors were a lot more peripatetic than we realize. They went all over the place and they traded. They loved rice wherever it arrived.  The Moors' word for it was al-ruzz. 
Good word.  I love it already.  And the Spaniards took away the awkward "l-r" sound and elided it into arroz.   Que viva el  "¡Arroz, arroz, arroz!"  YAZZYBEL