The first cold morning

Monday came in cold. Not really cold, not like Tijuana, where Rodrigo says his windshield freezes in winter, but Oaxaca cold: eleven degrees at six in the morning, the patio bricks icy under bare feet, and that little cloud that comes out of your mouth when you open the front door to take out the trash. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, bag in hand, watching my own breath as if it were news. Every year it is news. Every year I forget that this comes too.

My mother, who feels the cold before the thermometer does, was already sitting on the edge of her bed with her rebozo over her nightgown. She said, "Get the sweaters out." She said it in the voice she used to use to get me up for school, and I obeyed with the same face.

The trunk

From March to October the sweaters live in a wooden trunk at the foot of my bed. It was my grandmother's. The lock has not locked for forty years, and there is a drip of wax on the lid that nobody can trace to any particular candle. When I open it, the whole house knows: a smell of mothballs comes out so strong that the neighbor's cat, who peers over the wall, jumps down and disappears.

I laid everything out on the bed. My school sweaters, the gray ones and the navy ones, already pilling at the elbows. A denim jacket Daniel left behind and I adopted. Two scarves I never wear, because in Oaxaca it is never as cold as you imagine it will be in October. And at the very bottom, folded inside a supermarket bag, a brown sweater in thick yarn, cabled down the front, with one button that does not match the others.

I took it to my mother. She held it with both hands, ran her thumb along the cables, along the edge of the sleeves, over the odd button, and said, "I knitted this."

And she had. She knitted it in Ejutla the winter I started teacher training college, with yarn she bought at the Thursday market. I remember because I wore it on the first day of classes and it itched my neck so much that I took it off on the bus. What I did not know was that she remembered. She no longer remembers whether she has taken her blood pressure pill, but she remembers the stitch. I put it around her shoulders, on top of the rebozo, and she kept it there all morning, like a lady who has come back from a trip still wearing both coats.

The lost-and-found box

At school, you can see the first cold morning at the gate. From one day to the next, my fourth graders arrive bundled up: uniform sweaters, older brothers' jackets, a Guerreros hoodie that hangs on Ángel like a dress. At eleven, when the sun comes out and the playground warms up, they all take them off at once, as if someone had given an order, and drop them wherever they land. By half past one nobody knows whose is whose.

That is what the lost-and-found box is for. It is a banana crate in the principal's office, under the water jug, and in October it fills up in a week. Yesterday the principal asked me to go through it, because "you have nice handwriting," which is what they always tell me when there is a job nobody wants. I sat in the staff room with a black marker and the crate on my lap.

Sixteen navy sweaters, all identical, not one with a name. A knitted hat with bear ears. A single pink glove. A sweater that, judging by its size, could only belong to a first grader and, judging by its smell, to a first grader who eats a lot of tangerines. I went through labels, seams, pockets. In one I found a marble. In another, a folded slip of paper that said "I love you mom" in the handwriting of someone who has just learned how to make an m.

I set that one aside. I wrote "1st B" on the label with the marker and took it to the classroom myself. Miss Cristina held it up in the air and a girl with braids let out a shriek as if someone had given her back her dog. She said nothing about the note. Neither did I.

In the afternoon

When I got home, my mother still had the brown sweater around her shoulders. The sun on the porch had been on it all afternoon and it hardly smelled of mothballs anymore; it smelled of her, which is something else. She asked whether I was cold. I said no. She took the sweater off anyway and held it out to me, arms stretched, just as she did thirty-odd years ago at the door of the house in Ejutla.

I put it on. It still itches my neck. I kept it on until dinner.