When the rains came to our leaking Honduran house

corrugated-tin roof and gaps under the doors

water would spread over the brick-red tiles on the floor,

any clothes on the line soaked through all over again.

I remember that particular night, running back through the storm alone,

lightning-lit sky and the road a river of rainwater,

my sandaled feet metronoming a watery rhythm.

For Earth Day, we planted watermelon and frijoles,

and I watched amazed as one often disengaged student, Arnold,

came to life pushing wheelbarrows and shoveling dirt.

An hour and a half left me with blisters on my thumbs and a sore back,

leavings of the labor I was so unaccustomed to.

I think of the problems I faced with perra and prostituta namecalling, of those boys, beloved, who wept when I made them apologize, explaining that real men don't use those words.

I can't remember Jose Javier without smiling, the little guy who was okay with being called Jose, Javier, Javi, or even ''J.J.,'' but when I called him ''Javs'' informed me with utmost seriousness, ''My name is not Hobbes, Miss.''

And when I tire of my first-floor, plainish apartment, what about that week in March, when we found five tarantulas living in our casa? Later there were triple termite hatches of thousands and always, of course, the occasional cockroach.

Buses were graced by creepy and pitiful-looking payasos performing screamed songs for a lempira or two. Tambien, ladies, men and children selling cheap fried snacks to earn their exhausted living.

This land I long for, that which breathed life into me and drew my blood, leaving me unchangeably wounded and marking my mouth with its taste, so I will never drink water the same way, my leg muscles not forget how to move upon the uneven earth of the South. I take the strangeness and the heartbreak and beauty and hold it close to my cheeks. My Latin time is not finished, I know, and speaking Spanish daily meets a deep need, but the chosen separation still makes me ache inside.