Mexico

I'm homesick.

I'm homesick for a place I have never fully been a resident of: Mexico City.

You step out onto the street, hand clutching a patterned kitchen towel, and your nose is met by a barrage of scents: dog excrement and car exhaust, mostly. The metal door clangs shut behind you and you walk, admiring the walls hiding homes behind bars, splashes of color in what would be a grey city. Turn a corner, then another, and you see it: the tortilla shop, an opening in one of the walls forming a counter at the corner, a smiling man making the dough just out of reach next to the tortilla-flattening machine. You ask him for some amount: "Quarenta tortillas, por favor señor?" He grins and puts the dough through the top of the machine. Forty tortillas come out, steaming, like paper from a printer. You put them in the towel and snag one off the top, a smooth warm tortilla, and salt it with the salt he provides on the side of the counter. You pay the man and walk away quickly, clutching the towel of tortillas to your chest to keep them warm and to savor the heat coming off of them, a heat like the heat of a lover pressed against you, a heat of life, of food, of the promise that these simple tortillas will bring people together in the ceremony of consumption.



Zocalo. The word itself means town square, or plaza. And that is exactly what it is, only so much more.

The first thing you are greeted by is the enormous Mexican flag waving proudly in the dead center of the world's second-largest square. Red, white and green pronounce themselves against the blue sky, the brown eagle clutching the snake in a deathgrip. And the people! Hundreds of people mill about, dancers wearing feathered headdresses and shells around their ankles, wielding smoking incense, tourists meandering through, admiring the cathedral and the capitol buildings, children chasing pigeons, merchants selling balls with tinsel on the end and small plastic birds that whistle when blown through, musicians playing every type of traditional music you can find.

Every hour, the bells toll. The pigeons fly up en masse and then settle back, disgruntled.



My writing spirit has died right now. Maybe I'll write more later.