Home Again

        Here I am again back in the U.S.
        After being in Guatemala for almost a month it is a lot.
        It is a lot to think about the fact that I've been gone for almost a month.
It feels like more and less both at the same time and my sense of time has been changed.
        I spent a week in San Lucas staying in a hotel full of succulents and working in communities.  We built stoves and friendships, we spread cement and smiles.
       The weekend was spent in Xela (Shay-La) the second biggest city in Guatemala.  There we went Salsa dancing and sight-seeing and stayed with host families that welcomed us into their homes even though it was only for three days.  Xela was the place of hot springs and we rode in the back of a pick-up truck up the side of a mountain until we reached pools of relaxation and rejuvenation at the top.  We left there shriveled like prunes and smelling of the sun.
        The next week we spent up in the mountains, learning the language we were surrounded by.  We had class in grass huts that were built by a medicinal tea brewer named Jorge. I ate meals with an old lady covered in wrinkles and full of stories.  We bonded over pancakes with pineapple marmalade and she taught me how to make tortillas.  The week ended with graduation from the Escuela de las Montanas and a long bus ride back to Huehuetenango and then off to Chacula.
        Chacula is charming, beautiful, homey, pleasant.  It is a small village and there we stayed with host families for the week.  my family was the two parents and then three kids, a fourteen year old girl and a thirteen year old girl, and then an eight year old boy.  They were all happy children that cried when we said good bye.  The mother, Catalina, had a booming laugh and a wide smile, and she made me a hand woven bracelet that smells of woodsmoke and memories.
Did you know that memories have a smell?
         Our week in Chacula was full of adventure and laughs and beautiful places.  We hiked to a waterfall which turned out to be a moss covered wall with ice cold salvation running down it's face.  We hiked to ruins that were surrounded by green and gray and white and for two hours I drowned in stories.  We played volleyball with the locals and my team, Los Ganadores, emerged victorious from the tournament.  Our goodbye was tearful and then we drove twelve hours back to Guatemala City and slept for three or four or five hours, getting up for our first plane at 3:30 am.  We flew home through the skies and then there we were, back on American soil, my eyes happily reading all the signs that were suddenly in English again.
        The trip was so much more than just this and my stories will never be enough to do everything that happened justice, but I hope that you vicariously through me for a little while, a little while that may inspire you to one day go and see it for yourself.