four-letter word

During the hot and humid summer days, I’d wander the streets of Cartago with Tita and my sister. We’d walk through Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, stop at panaderías, and run errands at the ferreterías. I would trace my fingers along the bark of big trees Tita said were there en aquel entonces. Then, when the sun would dip below the clouds and day turned to night, we would sit around the dining room table in my great-great aunt’s house. My sister and I would sip tea and catch whatever Spanish of the conversation we could understand, waiting to slip away to play video games. Summer days moved slowly, and we were there for weeks. We made this trip to Costa Rica every year for several years. My sister and I got a sense of the place my grandma, Tita, called home.

It’s been seven years, and if I were to return, Cartago would feel unfamiliar, perhaps unrecognizable. Since the last time we visited, relatives in Costa Rica have passed away, sold their homes, and moved to the capital, San José. A train runs through the city, making it a hub that it never was, filling the centers with people in place of trees. (And a scroll through Google Maps shows Burger King, Taco Bell, and Starbucks on street corners—what better metric of change?) Seven years have changed the place. I wouldn’t know where to go, who to see, or what I could consider a home base for the trip if I were to go to fly into Juan Santamaría and make the two hour drive to Cartago . The Cartago Tita knows and calls home is from before she migrated to the United States—56 years ago.

faucet is broken, a new laundry machine has been installed, and the dining table placemats are different—when I see mom is growing jalapeños, and dad is selling the Mazda, and my sister is turning my room into her extended closet, my concept of home liquifies. This image of a tree with long roots sprouting through the unchanged sturdy soil of home melts. Home is a puddle of water waiting to happen, a substance fragile and fickle without form and never firm. I am skeptical, deceived, betrayed, frustrated by home.

Whenthe new year rolls around, my family sits in Tita’s sala and talks about travel. Among the chattering of the new places we want to see and the regions we want to visit, someone suggests Costa Rica. Tita mumbles yeah and stares at the floor. I see hushed hurting for home. She pulls out a travel magazine and flips through it. “How about the National Parks?” she whispers.

- MICHAEL PAZ ’25

Igrasp at piles of twigs towering high, looking for the meaning of that four-letter word home. It’s been two years since I left home for college. When I go home and the kitchen

Abuela. Grandmother. Warned me She told me I’d miss the heat, The way it sits heavy on the spine, sweat dribbling down Between my shoulder blades it itches where my hairline disappears at the back Of my neck. I hold her and say I’ll be fine.