Leaving Home Long ago a very young Blanca got up at 4 am in a deep Mexican countryside, boarded an ancient grandfather bus, waved goodbye to sad parents through grimy, cracked windows. This bus with a front nose whose hood must be raised occasionally for man/machine dialogues, followed winding rutted roads up, up, up bump, sway. Sudden fog, then clear, then fog, tilting, jarring, dirt horse roads, rocks, cliffs, strange leaves larger than herself, sudden vistas hundreds of blue mountains, all called up by a straining, whining engine. Six hours later it sputtered to a stop. She had arrived with her tiny typewriter and her box of home made clothes at Secretarial School for Girls. Very Far north of her a young man left home hitchhiking without friends or money but old pickup trucks help the bewildered and also give advice: “Don’t ever marry, Son, women aren’t well made and will doctor bill you to death.” It took fourteen smiling drivers “Where you going, Kid?” to drop him as a stray cat on a university’s steps Beyond secretarial school and the university their roads meandered through sleeping mountains, washed out goat trails, international boundaries of armed guards, surveillance helicopters, bureaucratic Towers of Babel, which were all bypassed by monarch butterflies, migrating birds and much later by Blanca and Quentin. They met and married. If “ever after” can be just one lifetime, they lived happily ever after.