Meanwhile, I was feeling the sting of the bees. Imagine, more than a hundred of them. When I finally got to the house, I was lucky that my aunt was there. I didn’t have to explain anything to her. As soon as she saw me she ran to her room and brought out a big cigar and lit it and started puffng the smoke into my hair and they all flew away, but not before my head, face and hands were swollen, making me look like a monster. It took about a month before my face was back to normal. I was very lucky that it didn’t get infected. I think I spent more time with my cousins at my grand-mothers house that week.

A month later I went to Rincon and one of my cousins invited me to a farm where they rented horses and said to me, "We’re going horse back riding." I looked at him and said, "You know, I never mounted a horse before." and he said, "Well, you have to try some time, don’t you think?" So he spoke to the man in charge and he gave him two of the horses and he helped me climb on one of them. He gave me some instructions, then he got on his horse and he started to ride in front of me.

We were on our way. We didn’t go too far when the horse had to cross a small stream. He had to bend his neck down, but with my luck, the saddle was too loose and I fell to the ground and the saddle fell. I began to feel a sharp pain in my back. I never went to see a doctor but in a few weeks I started to feel much better. By then I was back home in Mayaguez working at the factory.

When I was in the 6th grade I had to go through an exam which I failed and I dropped out of school. I never went back. A few years passed and that's when I started to work at the factory. My mother didn’t like the idea that I dropped out but I continued to work with my father. By that time, we weren't doing very well and we were losing money. My father was thinking about selling the factory. But that wasn’t too easy to do. There was another house, the one we were living in, which was built next to the factory. He bought the lot some time ago and had the house built by a man he knew. He was a very good carpenter. One day when the house was under construction, my father went upstairs to check on how they were doing and there was a false board he stepped on; and he fell to the first floor. Luckily he didn’t get hurt too badly. That house was very well built. The windows were made to slide up and down instead of opening to the outside. At that time there were no windows like that in Puerto Rico. It had a kitchen in the first floor, living room, and a sink and toilet under the stairs going to the second floor. On the second floor were three rooms, one full bathroom, and then a front porch in the front of the house.

I felt bad that the house was for sale. That house was our last one in Puerto Rico.

We were starting to get ready in case we sold our properties and started to build crates we needed for some of the furniture, making it easy to reassemble and put them in the crates for when the time came. In 1929 the factory was sold but not the house. We had friends that we trusted very much. We picked one of them to be in charge of selling the house. About a year later we left Mayaguez by train to San Juan. That day we stayed in a hotel and the following day we took the Puerto Rico steamship that took us to New York. We were on our way to our new life.

It took us four days to get there. As soon as we started getting off the ship, I saw Clydesdale horses pulling loaded wagons by the docks. There were girl cousins of ours waiting for us, and they took us to their house. We stayed with them until the next day. One already had an apartment for us on 3rd Avenue and 104th Street. It wasn’t too good for us since it was too noisy because the elevated train passed by every half hour, but at least we had a place to stay until we got a better one.

The truck came with the fumiture and set the crates and other boxes in front of the building and we soon got busy taking them to the second floor where we were going to live. We had a few people from the neighborhood watching us do the work. It took us a few hours, but we had everything upstairs. Then we started to assemble the living room furniture and by that evening we had it all done. We took a good rest, bought some food and finally went to sleep.