You head back from your twice a week teaching in Tlacochahuaya. Though you prefer to linger in the dusty streets as long as possible, the other teachers long to race home.
The town gets smaller, and the winds rise, as you make your way back to the city, back to noise and the traffic of cars and tourists and salespeople.
There’s a speck of the town left in your window, as if a pin stuck into a map to mark a distant land that is the antonym of merciless industry.
You know you are drawn there magnetically as a creature knows how to return to its place, this place that recalls the sweet orbit of your childhood.
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In “Returning,” Mary Finette Barber writes: “Surely so sweet a land will call to us…”
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Which land is calling you?
Will you respond? Why? How?
When?