Verde

The dream is this. A perfectly ordinary woman I work with tells me she is an alien. She tells me this because we are friends. She puts a black rubber patch over the left side of my face that, she says, will retrain my brain, let me understand her language, which is too strange to learn using Duolingo. She asks me to take a nap. I do and when I wake (in the dream), the first thing I notice is that I stink. Humans stink.

I wake up (for real) gagging.

The point of the dream, I decide over breakfast, is that a new language is more than just different words for the same things we’ve known all our lives. Each language is a world where we see—smell—differently.

I find myself wishing I hadn’t woken up so abruptly. What was the word for stink in my alien friend’s language? For friend? Or is that thinking small again, in mere words? Was friend possible in her language? Or smell? Maybe it wasn’t that I smelled bad, but that the concept of smell for the aliens did not exist—or did not exist until my body dropped into their world. Maybe my presence created the need for new words. Like alien, perhaps.

I took my first Spanish class when I was 50. We were spending two weeks in Guanajuato, Mexico, so that my daughter, 16, could study Spanish. She was in the advanced class. I was in the most basic one, in which you learned numbers and colors. On the second day, I learned verde. Green. I shivered. I was in a concrete, windowless room, but I could see verde—leaves, limes, avocados. I had worn out good old green. After 30 years teaching writing in an English department, when I said the word, all I saw were the letters G R E E N, like tiles in a game of Scrabble. But verde. I rolled it around on my tongue. I could taste it. I could smell it. Verde smelled like being alive.