The name Ashley is an English baby name. In English the meaning of the name Ashley is: Lives in the ash tree grove. The definition of my name could also be what defines me, but luckily I have decided to allow myself to define my name instead. Ashley means hope. I wanted to know the exact definition for the word hope.
I am extremely scared to use any word in the wrong context or rather something even more humiliating so I decided to not take any risks today and I asked Google, hoping I was right, and it defined it to be “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen”. For example I hope that your coffee is perfect at your first attempt at making it taste good, I hope everybody has somebody to love them, and I also hope that everybody can earn their version of success.
When I am asked for my name I say Ashley Marquez because I take pride in it more than all the nicknames I have been assigned.
When I hear somebody say my name the scenery before my eyes if filled with flowers dancing in the middle of a snowing winter. When I say flowers I mean the ones you can find at any Texan park in early spring, the type of flowers little girls pluck and collect in their hair the type everybody knows yet we are unaware of the name for its name done not define it either. The snow is my last name: Marquez. I picture snow as my last name because I can be just as cold if my family isn’t as safe as I feel it should be.
Marquez is the kind of last name where if somebody were to have to read it without knowing how to pronounce it first they would butcher it into 50 different ways. Nonetheless my last name reminds me how in summer me and my extended family would wake up at 4 a.m to come over to our humble piece of land and work on it.
Afterwards we would go back home to take a shower and once we were clean we made a carne asada as a sign of appreciation. When we would comeback we would have an electricity generator and my uncle would bring a speaker he bought at the flea market which for some unknown reason he was so proud of and we would move the generator all the way to the back of the lot and use extensions so we could actually listen to the music.
The neighbors could not seem to understand how we could just party but they only saw the tip of the iceberg. They could not comprehend that my family has literally been there from the beginning of existence and if we keep up the pace we will be there until the end of time and space.
My last name means family. Marquez are the nights in which we make champurrado in an iron pot in winter, drinking it like it was ambrosia of the Gods along with tamales my grandmother made. The side dish to that being the Marquez’s stories, like howmy father bullied my mother’s brother into making “coincidence” start a friendship that would soon transform into a lovers tale. Dessert would be about how as a baby I would wake up in the middle of the night hungry, and unlike most babies instead of crying for attention I would waddle into the kitchen and use the container of powdered milk as a drum letting them know what I needed. Marquez could sometimes mean goofy but it also means we can be shields and are vigilant, looking out for each other.
Unlike a wolfpack there is no one true alpha, instead us Marquez are more like a flock of birds pigeons we may look like an utterly confused group of birds, but it’s more like an airborne hierarchy. By strapping tiny global positioning system (GPS) backpacks onto the birds, researchers have found that a flock follows several leaders at any given time in flight. But the flock’s leadership can change so that even low-ranking birds sometimes get a chance to command.
