This is my entry to 
Crossing
"Okay, Granny, close your eyes and hold on to my arm," I said. My grandmother grew up in the mountains. She was used to crossing rivers, rocky and even flooded rivers, but she was terrified at the very idea of crossing the pasarela that connected the town to my barrio.
“That damn hanging bridge can fall anytime. It’s too high,” she used to say. “In my days, when we produced a bridge, we fell the thickest tree and put it across the river. You walked on it, not even two inches from the water.” I could not argue against that. I guess engineers might find a way to solve that if they wanted.
No explanation would make her change her mind. She did not care about the thickness of the wires that held the bridge or how perfectly welded the metal plank of the floor were. They were actually very fragile and rusty. After each repair, which happens every election, it did not take too long for the first holes to appear on the floor. Crossing that thing was actually pretty risky business, but I was not going to tell her that.
She was so stubborn that she refused to sleep in a bed other than hers. Thus, the night she visited my sick mother and the storm that hit later that afternoon caused the biggest growth townspeople had ever seen in that river, my grandmother preferred to cross the pasarela later at night than sleep at my mother’s.
That was the big difference between them - he was a jumper and she was a wader. I had never thought about the relation or difference between these words. They made perfect sense in the context of crossing a river, but I found that out after digging my brain for an image that could make me understand the phrase. Two pieces of clothing, two actions. What a beauty. I actually discovered that I had always mispronounced the Spanish meaning of wading. We say vandear/vandeando (probably spelled with a “b” if we ever had to write it down). The thing is that this word is a job-related slang for “overcoming” a difficult situation or getting by. The correct word is vadear (no “n”), from vado (ford), meaning crossing a shallow point of a river.
No one I knew pronounced it differently, so I guessed it was an inherited corruption of the word that just became a colloquialism. Yo me vandeo con la venta de empanadas, would be a common expression of someone who made a living selling food.
A tea stain on the wallpaper can make you think about the damnedest thing, especially when the wallpaper no longer exist. We used to wallpaper the whole house. There might be remnants of wallpaper under 30 years of layers of paint, but to continue seeing a tea stain on the fucking wall, especially when people in that house only drank coffee, was more than surreal.
That stain did not belong in the wall. It was probably fixed in the mind’s eye and was extrapolated to the wall, just in the same way you can projects images with a video beam. My grandmother crossing that pasarela was just a projection. She never did. She preferred to walk three miles around town along the main road and cross the iron bridge that even though was also high in the air appeared to her to have a more solid look. It made her feel she was walking on earth, not hanging on a wire in the air. Of course, it helps to close your eyes and never look down.
