My aunt had moved to America. I was only a little girl when she left and couldn’t really understand why it was such a big deal. I thought it was like the channel between Britain and France, which in my eyes was the largest time you could spend travelling. Only months later when I finally started receiving geography lessons did I realize she wasn’t just crossing the channel, she was crossing an entire ocean.
At the time I thought it was romantic. She had defied our grandmother because she fell in love with an American. It brought images to my mind of strange foreigners with different customs than our own. My fantasy went wild with it, and when I finally met uncle Rodger, he was nothing short of a big disappointment.
Colombia was far more like what I had dreamed about back then. The sun w
