Nancy D Valladares

From A Fiction on What Was Once Dorothy.

I was buried beneath the cemetery at Lancetilla Botanical Experimental Station in Tela, Honduras in 1932. I’m writing to you, so you can remember. So you can build worlds and tomorrows by not committing my same mistakes. I can only tell you what I know, and what I have learned after centuries of communing with the soil and the critters beneath.

I was buried near the palmariums. The valley of Lancetilla had been cultivated and engineered for hundreds of years before we arrived, before the people who lived there had settled. Let me tell you about the worlds within worlds that came from Lancetilla. This has always been a place of death, where bodies were fed to the soil and then proceeded to becoming and transforming. In order to ensure the formation of the acres upon acres of plantations in the coast of Honduras, we chose to accept the death of many things.