Echar de menos: To miss, regret the absence of...

Echar is an interesting verb complete with many potential translations. It can mean: to cast, fling, hurl, pitch, or throw. Echar mano a- holds the significance of to grab. Echar raíces is to take root. Echarse- to lie down, rest, stretch out (oneself). There are so many unrelated ideas thrown together like heaping laundry into this verb echar. It is a fitting commencement for my first corralled thoughts on a certain type of home-longing.

Approximately two months ago I flung myself far from comfort and all definitions of the word home that I had ever gathered unto myself. I hurled myself into the unknown, mountain-edged mystery of the open, green brazos (arms) of Honduras. In my casting off of America I have shed myself of many once-dear, unquestioned lifestyle norms. I am begun, anew, in a strange homeland of a people with need wrapped around their bones; where I fit in no more than a clean mall, or well-built home. Absence is one of those things I carry with me. A lacking of the old familiar replaced by the brazen new.

As I navigate this strange, exciting, troublesome sea of foreign, I sometimes find myself angle or knee deep in this still pool of regret (one or twice it was waist deep). I am missing the pieces of myself growing in Portland, California and elsewhere. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and if I don't think or open my eyes, I am back home in the little loft-of-a-space I called my room in my parents home. Sometimes I look at the green pines of Honduras and think, if I count to ten maybe I'll be in the mountains of Lake Tahoe and I'll turn around and see the beautiful woman I walked with four days before I threw myself, wildly, into the tortilla-wrapped newness I am beginning to see as 'home.'


In my dreams I mosey down 23rd street, dressed in a hat from my favorite shop, licking a crumb of cheesecake off the corner of lip from Papa Haydn's.

When I am alone, I sing, in a loud, native tongue; I breathe in an unused technique, fill my lungs with sweet, syllabic English, and exhale a timber of a less-understood love.

When I cook, I fill my ears with the syncopated music of my father and his hand are next to mine, dicing onions, and his voice wafts in the warm light of my new (cockroach infested) Honduran kitchen, with the gentle advice of having the patience to not cook with to much heat. "Plus, the music lasts longer that way son."

Voy a echar raíces aquí, in este país, con esta gente, en este idioma. Voy a construir una casa de madera y canción, en las montañas verdes de este lugar. Voy a amar, enseñar, cultivar, y reír con niños. Voy a aprender yo mismo, escribir yo mismo, y cantar yo mismo para el año próximo.

....and I hope it is not without a touch of grace...

(I am going to take root here, in this country, with these people, in this language. I am going to build a house of wood and song in the green-lined mountains of this place. I am going to love, teach, grow, and laugh amongst children. I am going to learn myself, write myself, and sing myself for the next year).

A todo, les echo de menos.

Doesn't that sound just a little bit like the regret of your absence is etched into my personhood.... it does to me.

 

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