Since I was very young I liked places with plenty of water, which brings life and happiness, and makes the village beautiful. The canal was also a place of much activity where people would meet. Men would stop there early in the morning to let the animals drink on the way to work in the fields, to plant, tend or harvest the crops. In the late afternoon they would return home with the animals, letting them drink again from the canal before putting them into the corrals behind their homes. After dinner, the men could finally rest at home with their families, or at the center of town sitting on the huge flat stones laid across the narrow canal as bridges, engaged in conversation, telling jokes to people that passed by, while the children played hide and seek.

The women worked at home taking care of the younger children and the house. It seemed to me that women tend to be more sociable than men. The women would do some of the monotonous work in groups while talking together. Each day after cooking breakfast (without electricity or gas). They would bring the laundry to the little canal, their “washing machine” was their hands and the flat rocks. To make this hard task more interesting, many women washed their clothes at the same time, while talking or stepping on their clothes as if dancing with each other on the flat rocks. They also washed their hair there (which was terribly cold in the winter), and laughed as each took a turn having cold water run down their necks.

The children in my town didn’t have the toys of city children, instead they had small animals to take care of before and after school, such as dogs, cats, guinea pigs, chickens, and sheep. The children also took care of the family vegetable garden.

My mother had no husband, so my brothers and sisters had to work harder than the other children. As the youngest of 5 children, I did simple chores, one of these was to bring clean drinking water for our home. All the families in my town got drinking water where the canal enters our town from the north side beneath a hill, this place was named K’ocho, which means corner. The housewives or their children would go to K’ocho with buckets throughout the day. Instead of walking along the normal paths like everyone else, I would make my task more interesting, by walking in the canal playing with water and the little rocks, until I reached K’ocho, But once I filled my bucket, I would head straight home with no more distractions.

One day while walking in the canal I realized there were some silver and gold coins under the little rocks that lined the bottom of the canal. I was extremely amazed to see that and I didn‘t know how to react. I could not understand why I didn’t see them in my previous trips to K’ocho. After I dug out some of the half buried coins, I was not sure about telling anyone about the encrusted coins in the water of the canal. It seemed no one had noticed them there, even though people spent much of their time near the canal. As a little girl, I wanted to keep this secret to myself, and I did. After discovering the coins in the water canal, I would find any reason to go to the canal more often, even volunteering to wash the clothes. Instead of playing with the water and stones, I searched for the enchanted coins, making sure no one else knew I was taking out the coins. I was fascinated whenever I succeeded in getting another coin. I spent the first coins buying some sweets, but put the rest of my collection in my mother’s coin purse. As I continued to find coins, digging them out one by one, my mother‘s coin purse became heavier, she couldn’t understand why her coin purse was always filled with coins, even though she hadn’t put any money in it for a long time. I never told her about my coins.

My mother, was very religious, she eventually concluded that a saint felt sorry for her, because she felt humiliated when she didn’t have money in her purse to buy things other families could. She was anxious to find which saint was providing these miraculous coins, making sure she always had some money. She would leave the coin purse near the tiny statues of her favorite saints, to see which would make the coin purse grow heavier quicker. My mother showed off her coins a few times to some of the better-off women, who had made her feel bad that she had less money then them.

Even as a young girl I already knew that the people of my town liked coins as much as my mother. I feared if they knew, they would dig it up the whole canal in one day, leaving me with no more enchanted coins. So I continued to quietly dig out coins, a few a day, small and large sizes, and leave them in my mother’s purse. My enchanted experience of the coins lasted from when I was five years old, until I left my hometown at eleven years old. It came to feel like a normal thing to me, because the experience lasted for many years.

I went back to my town of Ushua after thirty five years, and was eager to see the rustic canal I remembered. I was sad to find they had changed the water canal, rather than being lined with small rocks, the bottom was covered with cement. I cried as I walked along the water canal, I didn’t see a single coin. I told a few of the people how I had found coins between the rocks in the previous canal, they were surprised, nobody else had ever found any coins there. I don’t know how the coins got into the old canal, maybe they fell out of pockets in the dark and rolled into the canal and became half buried over many many decades, or maybe they really were enchanted coins to help a poor little girl‘s family.

My town of Ushua was small enough that everyone knew each other, most were related to each other one way or another. As you walked down the street you would be greeted by several people, each asking how your family was doing and telling all the news they had heard. People lived from their small tracks of land by farming and raising animals for themselves. Some lived a little more comfortably than others because they had more crops and animals.

Although my mother was descended from a good hard working family, she was foolish when young, and didn’t have a husband. Our few scattered pieces of land inherited from her grandparents weren’t very productive with just my mother and children alone to water and weed it.

My mother had great appreciation for the things in our old one room adobe home that had belonged to her ancestors, especially the big tall old iron bed she inherited. It was known in the town that the original owner of this prized bed was my mother’s grandfather, once the president of Peru. The iron bed was so heavy, it took many people to lift and move it.

Our entire family slept in that bed, which included my mother, her five children, our three big dogs, and two cats. Underneath the bed slept our small herd of ten sheep, protected from the pumas and cold outside. Our guinea pigs would snuggle between the sheep to keep warm at night, and during the day run around the floor and every corner of the house. There may also have been a flea or two.

There we no closets in our small adobe home with dirt floor and walls, so we hung our good clean Sunday cloths on the headboard of the bed; each child competing for the limited space to hang our cloths, We couldn’t hang anything on the rail at the foot of the bed, because our three roosters liked to sleep there, instead of sticks perched in the wall; we didn’t mind our roosters wanting to sleep close to us, except at about midnight and at five in the morning, when all three would suddenly stand up on the rail at our feet, flap their wings, and crow together in their loud imitation of 3 male Italian sopranos, waking up everyone to go work in the fields early in the morning. The bed was a little crowded, but we all enjoyed it.

The mattress was not as comfortable and soft as the modern mattress I have today; it was just a large wool bag woven by my mother, and filled of straw collected from our field after the harvest. Straw was OK, except when the sheep underneath the bed would take big bites out of our mattress; we would look down and see them chewing at night, as an Andean person chews a big wad of coca leaves in his cheek.

Us children, the dogs, and cats all loved the blankets my mother wove from the wool of the sheep under the bed. I think the wool blankets were the softest and warmest that I ever had, they gave us great comfort during the cold nights.

The younger children in my family, like myself, wanted to sleep in the middle of the bed to stay warmer, at the same time our dogs and cats also wanted to sleep in the middle, we had to fight while sleeping for the best spot and the blankets. Many times we would be awakened by the roosters, and find ourselves without any blankets in the cold morning, and see our dogs and cats nicely wraped up with my mother’s woven blankets, peeking their heads out of the small holes they made in the blankets.

As the time went by the roof of our old adobe house started to sag and leak on us each winter, it was unsafe so my mother wanted to move us and the big iron bed to a newer home. My mother asked many people to help her move the iron bed, but they couldn‘t because the door was too small to get it out. It seemed that the old house had been built around the iron bed, and the bed could be taken apart into pieces. My mother’s became concerned each winter whenever the rain approached our town. She couldn’t replace the roof of the old house because the walls were already too old. People suggested breaking down the wall to get the bed out, but how could we get it into the new house without breaking that wall too?

My mother’s older children were contemplating her situation quietly, wanting to help solve the problem. One day while my mother went away to a neighboring town leaving the children alone, one of my brothers, the one who considered himself to be the problem solver, borrowed a hacksaw to cut iron; he managed to cut the Iron Bed in small pieces, then he moved the pieces to our new house and happily waited for my mother to get home and tell of the wonderful work he had done. When my mother came back home and saw the pieces she almost fainted.

This story is true. Thirty five years later when I visited my old home in the remote mountains in the Andes , I saw the rusty Iron Bed pieces still in a dusty corner of the house, tied together with wire. And wanted to share the story of that great old iron bed.