When we lose someone special, a loved one, we usually say that person was an angel or that he is an angel on earth. But this woman was not an angel for a single person, but for many. Those of us who had the immense pleasure of meeting her felt this way.
Jovita, that was her name, Jovita Castellanos... A surname that I learned about 20 years after meeting her. What I did know very well was her kindness, her love, her detachment.
She lived in a rustic cabin on the top of a mountain far from everything, in Venezuelan lands. Always in her wood stove, making coffee, fanning the coals to make her arepas, surrounded by her children; grandchildren and great-grandchildren, rural men and women who helped her grind coffee, corn or make cheese to sell and improve her finances.
The best coffee and the best "arepas" in the world if you ask me, because they were made with love and dedication.
No matter where in the country or in the world you were from, if you came to her house, she attended you with full hands, the first thing she gave you was a cup of the best coffee in the Venezuelan countryside, coffee that you always appreciated for the cold of the mountains around you. If you were hungry, or if you were not, she would give you a plate with arepas of ground corn at home with her own hands, and you could not stop eating them, if you did, if you refused to eat them, she was sad because she felt that the you despised.
An elderly woman, her face drawn with the furrows of the years and the harshness of country life; gray hair, her skin smoked and parched by the smoke from the wood stove; eyes tired from the aches and pains of old age, but at the same time, Alive !, with that brightness of someone who lets herself be surprised by everything around her, and with a girlish smile as warm as her stove.
In winter, when there was a cold in the mountains that broke the stones, she did not allow you to sleep in the tents. Jovita was able to vacate an entire room, to grab her children and grandchildren and put them to sleep on the floor only to offer her hospitality, so that you slept in bed and in warm blankets.
Today she is not there, the disease took her away. But she will always live in my memories, in my happiest memories of when I was a boy and I toured Venezuela and met so many special people who flooded the world with their love.
Wherever you are, Jovita, I always carry you in my heart.
