It's easier for your afternoon to slip away while you watch the play of sunspots and shadows cast by the canopy of trees under which you live than it is to remember there's a town below where other gringos go about activities that were once so familiar to you--sipping cocktails, talking about the playoffs, worrying politics--but now seem more foreign than your Spanish speaking neighbors.  Your skin is darkening under the Nicaraguan sun and if only your tongue and brain would cooperate at a faster rate to produce new sounds, remember the substitutions, conjugate verbs, you, too, could be one of them.  Except for, of course, you never would be.  How could you ever hope to incorporate the nuance, the slang, the generations of bred-down history coursing through their thoughts and words.  Would you, in fact, even want to?

You were once an insider of the culture you naturally belonged to (if birth is a natural indicator).  You left so life could be new and surprising, so that you'd be on the outside looking in with yearning to see how it all works, given again the fresh mind of a child who doesn't already know.  So, perhaps, up here on your hill, a perfect point of observation, it is best to simply see...and wonder.