Camilleon

At this late end of winter, I often catch myself daydreaming about the ocean, the rainforests, the coconuts sold in the backs of pickup trucks. I can almost smell it. And I can almost feel my skin being kissed by the sun again.

I am a teenager once more, my whole family there, held in a vehicle frozen in the strands of these memories. My parents play 80s tracks on loop and tell us about better days, when they danced to these songs at the club. About how they fell in love in La Ceiba, and their dates were constrained by my dad’s college-student stipend.

It is a journey from one end of the southern and hottest tip of Honduras, well, to anywhere else, it seems. Our truck hugs the curves of the mountainous roads that look so out of place, winding into our truly majestic mountains carved out of the sky, leading us to the rest of the country. I’m experiencing a giddy feeling unlike anything else, knowing that it’s Semana Santa and a full week of sunshine and adventure awaits.

Honduras is a wondrous country. Every Semana Santa we would set off to explore a new corner of it: walking the shoreline picking sand dollars in Trujillo, spending nights in quaint hotels adorned like an abuelita’s spare room. I’ve explored cities of greater renown, and nothing has quite matched the feathery embrace of those remote towns we’d stop by on the way to our destination.

Tasting foods along the way that speak of our roots, of the fruit of our land, varying from region to region. Corn-derived desserts, meals, and drinks that took hours of labor. Our traditional dishes take hours of labor to produce, yet that effort is a living patrimony; without these recipes passed down, we’d lose the echoes of our land’s natives, a direct thread back to them.

I’d prefer to explore our history this way: by walking the mountainous regions and tasting the dishes from the diners along the way.

I am drenched in nostalgia as I return from these memories, wondering how much has changed since I last left my homeland. Sometimes I wonder if I just see the past through a shade of magical realism, and I run my thoughts by my husband, just to check if I’m not too far from his experience. But he agrees, there’s truly something whimsical about my homeland, and our foods are under-appreciated by the world. “We need to go back,” we both say, looking at the dreary wind that traps us inside. The daydreaming becomes more yearning the longer the winter lasts.