Don Macho Se Va de Paseo
an excerpt

He pulled the door closed behind him. Allowing his hands, cracked and stained from a lifetime or work to rest a moment on the split, weathered wooden door, he thought of his wife and ached that she would not be coming with him on this new adventure. But, Miguel didn’t allow himself to wallow in what couldn’t be. Instead he turned a new eye on the few square miles of valley where he had lived his entire life. Figuring he would never see it again, he began the long walk up the pocked dirt road that would bring him, forty-five minutes later to the highway, where he would wait for the bus.
Miguel, or don Macho as the townspeople called him respectfully, was in his seventies the day he reinvented himself. Born, raised, married, forcibly pensioned without a pension in the same valley in the highest mountain range of Costa Rica, Macho had never even traveled to the capital of his own country. Today there were foreign tourists who knew his country better than he did, and he had lived more than seventy years in it. With forty-five minutes, plus seventy-some years to reflect before he climbed on the bus for his first grand adventure, Macho felt something unknown to him as he walked the road he had walked thousands of times before. Thrill.
As an infant, he had been carried along this road by his mother to visit the family doctor in the next valley over. As a child, he had walked this road with his brothers to buy milk from the family with the cows. As a teen he had roamed this road aimlessly, hand in hand with his future bride. As a father he came full circle, carrying his own children down the lane that had been beaten by thousands of footfalls. Today he traveled with a new purpose, and the road that he could have traveled blindly at night without a stumble or misplaced step, transformed for him, glowing with the promise of the unknown.