Something like homesickness

This morning I was walking along to the elementary school in my fleece jacket, picking my way down the cracked road.  It was warm but tiny lines rain (which they call "pelito de gato" or "little cat hairs") fell all around my face and everything was still, the way the country always is.  When I got to the school, a girl in my sixth grade class was unlocking the gate for a younger girl with a white bow on her head, so I slipped in.  The older girl led me to the director's office, where I was told that my class had been canceled for the day.

So I walked home with the stray dog, a thick-bodied lab who usually lies in the rocks outside the pulpería (the convenience store.)  I was in a good mood, kicking up rocks and left completely to myself.  I think it was the roughness of the pavement, the gaping potholes, that made me remember the smoothness of I-81 in Virginia.  This of course evoked images of America, of all the cars driving on roads with paved lines and guard rails, which seems both comforting and a little mad in its organization.  I could feel myself missing the roads (a silly thing to miss, I suppose), but I think the roads were some sort of symbol for everything about the U.S. that I feel homesick for.  Most of the time I don't think about it because I live in a house of people who speak to each other in English and who have recently lived in the states.  But I miss the roads I've always driven on: 340 and Old Liberty and Patton Farm.  How is it a chunk of crumbling road can make me miss home?  I don't even feel homesick until I let myself feel it.  And it almost feels good to sit in homesickness and swish it around a bit, the way I do in a bath.  Because, just like hot water, it makes you think of pleasant memories and familiar places.  But, just like a bath, the water becomes lukewarm and cloudy after a while and then you have to get out.

Sitting here upstairs on the bench in the high-ceiling wooden house, I'm brought back into this summer internship as I listen as downstairs Tomás excitedly talks about a project.  I remember my cold toes.  I feel like I have to write down this moment just as it is to ground myself and to so that when I sit in my bedroom at home, I can remember how I sat here in a grey day as Frances poured something into a pan.  I hear sizzling, just for a moment, and then everything falls back into a familiar hush.