While the tamales cooked in that giant olla, my mom, Grandma, and our Tia Fela from Texas told stories about picking cotton, infidelity, and death. My favorite were the stories about the unstable family members from Texas: the one that had OCD about sweeping his dirt floor, the one that had conversations with his urine, and the one they forced to wear mittens so he wouldn't pick and scratch at his face. Grandma and Tia Fela disagreed about the details because Grandma remembered the day she was born so, of course, she remembered the color of the knitted yarn and the shape of scratches on primos face. But Tia was more of a memoirist and told only the emotional truth. She pointed to her temple and said "el estava malito.".