Tears rolled down my cheeks as the blue Ford truck passed my mother. I wouldn’t see her again for two whole months. It was summer vacation and I was headed to Chihuahua, Mexico. Since the age of six I had been spending my summers in Mexico. Now at 15, I was trapped in many wonderful memories of Mexico. Thoughts of sunny afternoons outside my grandmother’s front garden swept through my mind. We would water jeranios, calveles, rosas, laureles, jasmines, margaritas, and all kinds of other flowers. Sometimes, if I got lucky, my abuelita would cut some and stick them in my hair. I felt so beautiful as she fixed them with her hard-working hands.

Sundays after church, I would run down the dirt streets to the tortillería, a store where they make corn tortillas. I’d pay and walk home very carefully to make sure the tortillas wouldn’t fall from my hands, the package warm and heavy in my fingers. Once I arrived home with the tortillas, we would gather around the kitchen table and eat.

My grandmother’s house had also been home to my uncles and aunts, but especially to my mother, since she had been the last to move out. My abuelita would sometimes run outside to el cuartito, a small room made of adobe bricks by my uncles, where she kept her treasures under lock and key. She would bring out dusty books of photos and papers. In each photo I would catch a glimpse of my mother. We would spend hours looking at these and studying her papers from school.

Sometimes at night, my grandfather would sit on the back of his rusty truck and tell me stories he had told my mother when she was my age. My eyes grew large at the wild details of his stories. I guess, because I looked so much like her, my grandfather would often call me by her name. I sometimes imagined I was my mother in Mexico. My mother’s hometown has become part of me and connected me to her life. I would not give it up for the world, because it’s a treasure of memories.