Song of the Mockingbird: My Journey with Josefina

The bell rings and I stack my notebooks and head for the door. School is finally over for the day, and today has not been a success. Everything looks fine on the surface, but I want to be back at my old school, back in my old life. I miss Chicago: the skyscrapers, the blaring horns, the stone apartment buildings crowded together. I miss taking the El on Saturday afternoons with my friend Danielle, and my old school with its twisty iron gates. I miss Drama Club, and being cast as the lead in Annie this year. But that was all before our parents told me and my brother, Henry, that we were moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We’ve been out here for two weeks now, and it’s so different: rocks, sand, cacti, wind, silence. The buildings are a tan, mud color and crouch low under a sky that seems like a huge blue bowl turned upside down. Our new house is made of mud too. Dad calls it adobe, and says houses have been built this way since ancient Indian times. In our apartment in the city, we could look right into the windows of the family across the courtyard. Out here, our neighbors are big rocks. At night, when the sunlight fades, there are no lights and no sounds, except an eerie noise that I thought at first was children screaming. Turns out it’s coyotes howling.

Henry loves it out here, of course. He always likes anything new. I’m trying to like it, since I’ve always loved adventures, and Dad insists life in New Mexico will be great. But on our first day here, my black German shepherd, Daisy, and I went for a walk down a winding path away from the house. Daisy spotted a strange little reptile on the path, barked, and lunged, and blood shot out of its eyes and splattered her face. We ran back to the house. Mom says it’s a horny toad and it does that trick to ward off predators. This was not the kind of adventure I had in mind.