my great-aunt

My great-aunt Antonina was born in a respectable family and she is the youngest of three children. She grew up in  Valdepeñas, a town in Ciudad Real. Her childhood was hard because of the postwar years. In fact, her father was in jail for a long time due to his political ideology. When he was released in the end, he died soon afterwards of a brain stroke. She and her brothers and mother had to work a lot to move forward. She tells that when somebody wanted to buy something on the black market, as she was the youngest of the three siblings, the older ones make her sell the items –for instance some bread-, since she didn´t realised that was something illegal.  In spite of all that, she is a self-confident person and she studied on his own every night after a workday.

As I see it, she possesses lots of good qualities like always putting others first (she has not a trace of a selfish streak), a good sense of humour, razor-sharp mind (she is highly intelligent), but the most interesting thing about her is that she is a striking storyteller, she has a vivid imagination.  This must run in the family, since my grandpa (her older brother) was a poet and a writer; it seems a quite common streak in my family (my uncle Antonio is a good writer too –he likes writing theatre plays, and he has even won literary awards like his father –my grandpa-; even my mother has always had good qualities and a great imagination to tell us –my sister and me- stories and tales.  As for my great-aunt Antonina, I look on her as a behaviour model and  I´d like to take after  her...  I wish I could follow her footsteps and I love her a lot!