My father has one sister and two brothers, and they live in Nawara. But all of my mother’s brothers and sisters have gone away, all to America except for Auntie Huda. She had four children and lived in Jordan. She died two years ago of cancer, and the saddest thing was that Hala, her youngest daughter, was studying in America and didn’t know how sick her mother was, so she didn’t come home and didn’t see her mother before she died.

My other two aunties, Shahira and Maysoun, went to the States with their husbands. Shahira has six kids and Maysoun has three. Uncle Hamdi and Uncle Haydar are in the States too, but they don’t have children, unless you count that Hala lives with Hamdi now. I have so many cousins. I have met most of them, though not Shahira’s youngest four, Khadija and her three brothers. Their father is poor so they cannot visit. Khadija looks so sweet and she always makes me laugh because she has such an Arab face and such an American accent. I love to watch the new fashions and accents of my American cousins in the videotapes they send.

Spring is clean and the sun rises victorious, returns smiles to people’s faces, returns energy to their bones. Clean air carries the scent of jasmine or orange blossom or diesel. Loud voices and great silence, so you can devour the sky or float in your dreams. An odd stirring creeps inside me which I can’t explain, though most of my friends show hints of a similar restless quality.

And now, as summer begins, I want to lie on my back and eat the sky. I want to be mischievous. I want to stare at Miss Maryam’s large pointed breasts, to stand this much closer to the vegetable man who winks, to let him touch my hand when he gives me back my change.

My mother has led me to believe that feelings and thoughts such as these will take me straight to hell, or make me turn out like my untame cousin Soraya, who ate too much cereal when she was young and has the foolishness of an American in her blood, and that may be true but I don’t much care. I want to sit in the garden and hike my dress up to my knees so my legs can feel the sun as it kisses them.

Big-mouth village. This one farts during morning prayers and by midmorning they’re talking in the coffee shops that I’m not allowed to enter about the three bowls of fool he ate that morning and how there has never been a louder fart.