When I was a little girl, I loved playing with words. I don’t remember a lot from when I was very young, but I do remember climbing up and nestling myself in the boughs of the giant (oak?) tree in our front yard, pocket dictionary in my hand. I think it was my mother’s — she was insecure about her English at the time, and still is to an extent — but we all knew it was really mine, for I would always find it as soon as I got home from school and run outside to hide behind the leaves. Every now and then, I’d have trouble with one of larger words in a book I was reading, but for the most part, I’d play Jumble or Hangman, usually on the hardest setting so I could not only figure out the structure of the words I was guessing at, but also to see them and learn what they meant.
Even after we moved away from Davis Monthan, from a land of deserts and mesas to one of evergreen needles and lichen, I longed for those warm days spent in my favorite tree, staring at the clouds while filling the lonely spaces between C and I.