A CRACK IN TIME
Retold by Request
PREFACE: In New Mexico, where Catholic and Native American belief systems blend, the beautiful and well-known luminarias (candles set in sand in paper bags) light walkways and top adobe walls in towns, and the lesser-known faroles (literally "lighthouses," small bonfires) illuminate yards in the desert at both New Year's and Christmas. While we Midwesterners think of them merely as Christmas decorations, many New Mexicans see them differently.
A CRACK IN TIME
A memoir by Richard Alan Young
We were driving on a pitch-dark night along a Pueblo Indian reservation in New Mexico. Because the traditional Pueblo people want no urban sprawl on their land, street lights, bright farm yard lights and lighted billboards are absent. (Passengers in planes approaching Albuquerque from the north, for example, see below them a sea of lights and a large dark square. The dark area is the Sandía Pueblo Indian Reservation. But we were passing a different pueblo on this night.) It was New Year's Eve and we were returning from an excellent meal at the Rancho de Corrales Restaurant in Corrales, owned by the Torres, Romero and Jaramillo families.
We drove by a dusty little graveyard, with about two dozen graves. One grave had a large headstone. On the headstone and down on the dirt, outlining the grave, were seven luminarias, votive candles in glass vases. They were very freshly-lit. I had seen plenty of candles in tall columnar glasses on graves in Mexico, but usually only one -- with the image of a saint revered by the deceased on the glass -- per grave. Also, in Mexico the candle was usually at the deceased's head, below and illuminating the gravestone. I commented on how unusual the outlining luminaria appeared to me, and that I had never seen that arrangement before.
Our friend, part Native American, smiled and said, "It's not to make the grave pretty. The one buried there was a witch, and the luminarias are to keep her from rising tonight."
"Why tonight?" I asked, associating the phenomenon of the dead arising with All Saint's Eve, October 31.
"It's New Years," replied our friend, "Where the old year ends and the new year begins, there's a crack in time. The dead can rise through that crack."
That night, we Midwesterners adopted serious expressions and gladly joined in the act of placing the thirty luminarias on top of the adobe fence walls of the home where we were staying...just before midnight.
"Para guardar contra las brujas."
To keep the witches away.
In that dangerous Crack in Time.
