Iberia

 I came across my old, ratty, much-used and much-loved Spanish-English dictionary while organizing the mud room.  As I picked it up, I remembered well the heft of it, the size in my hand, the font on the pages.  I spent hours thumbing through it, memorizing words and their definitions or trying to figure out what it was that someone had said.  I took it to Spain twice.  There is Mediterranean sand buried in the binding, bringing back the salty freedom of Chipiona.   There are violin shop notes and measurements inside the back cover, vestiges of my time in the violin shop of Laurent Lopez, an affable French luthier who confused my Spanish by speaking French as we worked.

It's surreal to see my name inscribed in the front cover, a different name, a different century, a different continent, a different language, yet still part of me.  Have I really lived so long so as to have memories of a former century?  Have I really experienced enough to have gained and largely lost two foreign languages?  I can read them, but to gain fluency, you have to be immersed, and I haven't done that in a very long time.

No matter.  I am well versed in the language of motherhood, of marriage, of friendship and of homeland.  Let the Spanish and Portuguese have Iberia.  I've carried an eternal piece of it to Utah, deep in my heart, where it can be buried but never lost, just like the Circe King of Andalusia, Extremadura, Madrid...