I’D BEEN BACK from studying abroad in Mexico City for a couple of days when I asked my dad, “Can I use the lavadora?”

“The what?” He didn’t speak Spanish. I knew that, of course. I didn’t even really speak Spanish. I had barely been able to hold a conversation for most of the six months I had just spent in Mexico. So why when I needed to do laundry, the only word that came into my head was in Spanish?

“You know, the…umm…the thing that washes your clothes?” What is happening to me? I thought. How could I be forgetting English? I thought I was great at English!