Welcome to the Journal.

My grandparents were magical gardeners. Theirs was not so much a garden but a small farm. I would lose myself for days in the carefully laid rows of nascent food that stretched from the rocks of Lake Huron to the sand of Lake Michigan.

Likely the garden was a typical size and I was much smaller (who knows if memory ever really serves), but the space seemed massive to me. In the summer my brother and I would trail my grandfather, picking sticky green beans from trellises and digging up worms to catch fish from the lake. My grandmother would fry the fish and boil the beans and dinner was ready. It was a kind of childhood experience that was etched in my heart every summer.

I have decided I will teach my daughter to swim this spring. This is a good decision, not only because the thermostat has registered at or above 100 F every day in our Mexican home, not only because we are blessed enough to have a pool during quarantine, but also because it might save both of our lives.

I want to invite you to a different kind of Mother’s Day this year. It’s fitting, since many people can’t see their mothers due to the quarantine, but also because the quarantine is the result — in my humble opinion — of the fact that we haven’t seen enough of our mamas in recent years. At least not in the big sense.

It was 104 F that day. When the sun went down it was barely any cooler. We turn the ceiling fan on to its highest setting, its helicopter wind carrying the sound of my voice away. Without words, he touches my steaming skin. I struggle to find comfort in his hands, though I really want to. I have avoided his skin for weeks, only seeing the dark spots behind him. But here he stands in front of me, falcon’s wings spread out in swirls of hair over his heart, and I know what is real.

I struggle with Spanish. No, let me say it this way: Lucho con el español.

This can be a problem for me, as I live in Mexico and most people I know are Mexican.

I studied Spanish for years in school, but, until now, I hid my fluency in the pages of my textbooks. Any student knows there is very little to be learned from those 1000-page tomes. So now that I am enrolled in the Spanish of Hard Knocks, I tell myself this story: Learning a new language is hard.

This story bounces around in my head every time I go to open my mouth. It catches the words on my tongue and destroys me before I conjugate my first verb.