Attention, Google Maps: My apartment is now a destination

Some of the kids know where I live now. So I've been getting lots of phone calls from unknown numbers - public phones - with familiar voices on the end of the line asking Watcha doin', or informing me We're downstairs (the implication being, Let us in!).

We've done homework and manicures, played with the cat, and schemed to buy one of those kiddie pools and put it out on the terrace and fill it with icewater. And we've done quite a bit of baking. It seems this is a new tradition, because when one kid goes home toting a bag of baked goods, the next one inevitably comes expecting the same.

This lovely young lady showed up at my house a couple days ago.
I asked her, What do you want to do?
She announced, I want to bake.

And bake we did.

Earlier that day I had gone to visit her family in the barrio. It's revelatory when I step into one of my kids' homes for the first time. To see the colors, hear the sounds, and feel the rhythms of their home lives allows me to place them in a new context, to see qualities and characteristics that may not stand out so easily in class. Inside some of the homes is overcrowded claustrophobic tchotchke kitsch; inside others, the sparsity of bare wall punctuated by one small frame or calendar page, whose end effect is to draw more attention to the vacant space around it than to anything else. In still others, there are pastel painted walls, sunlight filtering in green-gold through the windows and bougainvillea vines, and abuelito's soft strumming the current that carries his voice, the old-time pasillo melodies, through the house. Usually there are more people than beds, hence not much personal space.

Hence the teenagers showing up at my house.

Which, on the whole, I enjoy. There are days like last Friday where I find myself roped into attending workshops all. day. long. (which frequently turn into extended exercises in Not Dozing Off because, let's face it, if your attention wavers for a moment it is difficult to pick back up again in Spanish) and I want to throw myself down on the floor and kick and scream

,

and then there are days where I revel in the fact that it's my job to be serenaded by grandpa, be fed birthday cake for brunch, to make small talk about the motorcycle propped up in the living room, and then to take my turn at hosting later that afternoon. I feel like a Victorian socialite, minus the corset. Maybe I should get calling cards. Ah wait, I already have some...

...and they're yummy.