When the Flamboyan is blooming

This is a flamboyan tree. They say when it's blooming young women leave their houses, marrying their novios (boyfriends). Here in the country, when two young people move in together they are married. Whether they choose to get married in the church or by law is another special step, many do and many don't. Sometimes young women leave their homes without telling their families and so they call it getting married por la ventana - through the window because that's, figuratively, how they leave the house.

Well I'll be damned if this folklore isn't true...the flamboyan outside our house had only produced a couple flowers when my roommate, 26 years of age, took off on the motorcycle with her boyfriend. Several minutes later she sent us a text message informing us that they weren't just going for ice cream. It was our job then, to inform her mother. Although I am not a mother (of a human at least) I understand that eloping is not the ideal form of marriage of one of your daughters and neither is them moving in with a young man you don't know. But I still did not immediately understand the anger and tears that were shed by her mother or the general sadness, in place of joy, of the rest of family. I got up the next morning, feeling joyous at their young love and spontenaity, but to my dismay there were only comments about how much they missed her prescence already.

As the days have passed and she hasn't returned to the house I am beginning to understand what everyone else already knew; one of the women in our family has become the woman of a different family. We now have to take up the work she was doing and we will see her very rarely.
It's not that she lives far away, in a community only a couple kilometers from our house, but that she does not drive, has no money to buy phone cards to call, and she now has her own daily responsibilities in their house. As I have described it, it seems at first like a discovery chanel marrying off of a young villager to a man in a village miles away, but I suppose it wouldn't be so different from my own experience if I would have lived in my parents house with my mother until now and neither of us worked outside of the home.

I too, miss having her in the house now and I am looking forward to when they may have their own place where it would be customary to go and visit.