Earth’s Tongue
Each and every summer
for seeming aeons
talkative Cassandra and her family along with cat Tabby visited Granny’s farm to help migrants pick cherries from long rows of short, gnarled trees. Until the year she noticed her near lifelong friend Juan Davíd was absent. His aunt told her a horror story of how he’d swum the Rio Grande
over to Mexico to help retrieve cousin Juanita and return intact to America, but three nights later she arrived safely without him. This caused the people of the tiny river town Terre Lingua (“Earth’s Tongue”) to launch a fruitless search. Six months later, sixteen year old Cassandra from ice cream white Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and her tan St. Bernard mix “Looter” launched an expedition of their own, in search of the boyish brave brown Juan lost somewhere in the hot, reddish sagebrush sands across the Rio Grande, to unite all in their new northern home of homes, with cherry pie and ‘chew-wa-wa’ puppies in tow!
