Childhood memories of my hometown
Jess Ciccas
The train rumbled northward, leaving behind San Diego’s sun-stained skyline, slicing through the silence of the California countryside. I sat by the window, chin resting on my palm, lulled by the rhythm of the tracks and the hum of passengers scrolling through phones or dozing behind earbuds. But my mind—my mind was far away.
Somewhere between Oceanside and the inland hills, I drifted. Not just in thought, but in time.
I saw myself standing at the edge of a dirt road, under a wide blue sky that belonged to a different world. There was no traffic here—no steel rails, no horns or diesel fumes. Just the smell of warm earth, sweet hay, and something faintly burnt from a wood stove nearby. The sign above a cracked post read: Azacuelpa.
The place where my story began.
I was only two years old when I lived there, and yet in this moment, I remembered it all—clearer than yesterday, brighter than the sun that now flickered against the train window.
My grandfather, Enecón, was there, tall and lean, wearing his weathered straw hat and a shirt faded by years under the sun. His hands were calloused and strong, the kind that could calm a horse or build a home. He sat me on the saddle in front of him, laughing softly, letting the reins dangle as the old mare ambled down the path.
In my small hands, I held corn seeds—gleaming golden and warm from the pouch he’d given me. He said they were little treasures, the beginnings of something greater. I tossed a few into the air and giggled as they caught the sunlight. He smiled and said I had the spirit of a planter.
All around us, the land hummed. Not with machines, but with life. Chickens darted between fences, goats bleated from behind old gates, and pigs wallowed lazily in puddles of shade. I ran between them when he paused to tend the crops, barefoot, laughing, and free.
No one looked at the clock in Azacuelpa. There was time for work, and time for rest. For chewing sugarcane under the mango tree, and for watching the hills turn gold before dusk.
But now, in the seat of a modern train, I stared at the reflection of an older man in the window—myself. The cornfields were gone. The house, if it still stood, was just a memory clinging to cracked walls and rusted nails.
I passed the town once, years ago, on a return visit to El Salvador. I didn’t go in. I couldn’t. I just stood outside it, as if some invisible border held me back—not of land, but of time.
Azacuelpa is still there, they say. But my Azacuelpa—the one where my grandfather lifted me onto a horse, where the earth was soft and the days slow and endless—that place no longer exists.
It lives only in memory. Or in dreams.
Like the episode from The Twilight Zone, Walking Distance—where a man escapes to the town of his childhood, only to find it can’t truly be recaptured. The people are gone. The spirit is faded. What remains is a lesson: you can visit the past, but you can’t live there.
The train jolted gently, pulling me back to the present. San Juan Capistrano flashed past the window. Concrete replaced cornfields.
Still, for a few fleeting moments, I had walked through Azacuelpa again. And in the quiet space between memory and imagination, I had been a child once more—riding beside my grandfather, playing with seeds of gold.
And as the rails carried me forward, I held the vision close. Knowing those days won’t come again… but grateful they once were mine.
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