by Constancia Gomez
WARREN — I am so lucky that I live in Vermont. I love my family; I love my diverse group of friends and I love Vermont, but I also love Argentina and my life there. When I think about my childhood and all the possibilities that I have in Buenos Aires, growing up in a third world country, I am amazed with the fact that my life is awesome. Even though my parent’s economy had ups and downs, I was bilingual at the age of 4. We did not have an expensive lifestyle, but we had a lot of friends and we traveled to see my grandparents to the north of Argentina every summer.
I would stay for a month or two at my grandparent’s home and my grandma spoiled me so bad. We cooked, we played; she would play the piano for me and we just did girl things together. Was so much fun! But now that my parents and my grandparents are gone, I think about that time and maybe it was the best of my childhood. I think that I will re-create that if I can, but it is hard. Here if I want to send my child to a bilingual school, I would have to move to a city — maybe Boston, Chicago or New York City. But we have a farm, so it would be difficult to move the 35 goats to the Upper West Side. So, I am going to stay in Warren and send my daughter abroad for a year to Argentina, Colombia or Cuba and enjoy the macho-free stigma here. And keep having a great life.
Constancia Gomez is a teacher at PACEM, the founder of Spanish Musical Kids, a dancer and writer and lives in Warren with her husband, daughter, goats and chickens.
