I Lived on Butterfly Hill

Celeste Like the Sky
The blue cloud finally opens-just when the bell rings to let the Juana Ross School out for the weekend. I’d been watching the sky from the classroom windows all day, wondering just when the rain would pour down. I run down the hall and through the front doors with Lucila, Marisol, and Gloria at my heels. “Quick, girls, get under my umbrella!” Marisol shouts, and her cousin Lucila and I huddle close, one on each side of her.
“Valparaíso will be a swamp for the third weekend in a row.” Gloria groans as she opens her own umbrella. Cristóbal Williams catches up to us, grinning hello, but his smile quickly turns into a yawn. “Here, Señor Sleepyhead. I’ll share if you hold it.” Gloria shoves her pink umbrella into Cristóbal’s hand-the one not holding the magic pendulum he almost always carries with him.
“I’m starving,” he says. “Let’s go eat something.” That’s Cristóbal. Always sleepy and always hungry.
“Café Iris? Sopaipillas?” I suggest. “Where else?” exclaims Lucila, who loves Café Iris just as much as I do. The others nod their agreement and start walking up the narrow sidewalk crowded with people rushing to escape the rain, all trying not to fall into the gutter. A crowd of people swarms the cable car stop at the bottom of Barón Hill. From the weary expressions on their faces, I can tell this cable car is probably running slow-or not at all. On days when the rain is heavy, the mud flowing down the hills leaves all sorts of obstacles-tires, trash barrels, tricycles, and many lost umbrellas-on the wooden tracks.
We look at one another and roll our eyes. “Not again,” Gloria groans. Cristóbal yawns and throws his hands up like a question mark. We are all used to waiting for, and wondering about, the cable cars. Valparaíso is a city of hills-forty-two of them-that rise in the shape of a crescent moon overlooking the harbor. The cable cars are painted in beautiful crimsons, sapphires, greens, and golds that from a distance conceal their age-some were built a hundred years ago. And they still manage-on most days, that is to carry people to and from their homes on the steep hills. No matter how many times I have ridden the Barón Hill cable car, it’s always exciting. The track is so steep and the car so shaky that sometimes I fear it will topple down into the harbor far, far below. So that’s when I look out the other window, up toward the hills. They look like they’re on a canvas where a painter
has made one brushstroke with each of the colors on his palette, side by side in rows and columns atop one another. Such are the houses on the hills of my city, all knit tightly together like a quilt my Nana Delfina hangs out on the clothesline to dry, blowing in the wind-up, up, up into the sky.