Yá'át'ééh. My name is Loretta. I'm 27 and I'm Diné (Navajo). After five years working hotel front desks in Albuquerque I came home last summer, because my grandmother is 78 and has sixty-some sheep and goats and one bad hip, and because I got tired of being the only person in the break room who knew what mutton stew was supposed to taste like. Now I take classes at Diné College, do work-study in the library, and spend weekends at Grandma's place out toward Many Farms, at the end of a dirt road that turns to soup when it rains.

There is no computer at Grandma's and no phone line either. So I write in a spiral notebook at her kitchen table and type it up here when I can get a turn in the lab. That's why the entries come on weekdays. I save everything on a blue floppy that lives in my jacket pocket.

Darrell, my boyfriend down in Phoenix, called Wednesday night on my aunt's phone, which means my aunt heard my half of it, which means by now the whole family has heard my half of it.

He found an apartment in Mesa. Two bedrooms, air conditioning that works, ten minutes from his job. His cousin's wife can get me on at the front desk of the dental office where she works. He wants me to come down in December when the semester's over. He said, "They have a community college down here too, you know. Computers in every room." He meant it nice.

I said I'd think about it. He said, "You always say that." He's right. I do.

Here's what I can't say right on the phone. In Phoenix I'm fine for about two weeks. I like the restaurants, I like that the store has everything. Then something starts to feel wrong, like talking with my mouth full. Out here I know where I am. I know which hill is which. Grandma can tell which of her sheep is coughing from inside the house with the radio on.

And Grandma is 78. Nobody says it. Everybody thinks it.

Wilson in the lab says NASA lost their spaceship at Mars yesterday. It got all the way there and just went quiet and nobody knows why. I keep thinking about all those people in a room waiting for it to call.

Walked out to my car after and the moon was coming up over the pines, almost full, orange as a pumpkin. I sat on the hood a long time.

Midterm in Navajo on Thursday. Verbs. Yáadilah, which is about the same as "good grief." Lab closes in ten minutes. More later.

Cold enough in the mornings now for a jacket. Uncle Ray came Saturday with the stock trailer and took some of this year's lambs to sell. Grandma stood at the corral and counted them going up the ramp, out loud, in Navajo, and then went in the house and made coffee and didn't say anything for a while. She has been doing this every fall since before my mother was born and it still gets her. I didn't say anything either. I just drank the coffee. Her coffee could strip paint.

Sunday she sent me out with the sheep by myself for the first time this year. I did fine until the black goat, the one who thinks he's a dog, decided the wash was more interesting than home. I yelled at him for five minutes. When I got back Grandma was laughing on the step.

"You talk to them in English," she said. "They don't understand you. They're Navajo sheep."

Then she asked if Darrell was going to herd sheep in Phoenix. I said there aren't any sheep in Phoenix. She said, "Aoo'," yes, like that was her whole point, and went back inside.

The TV in the student lounge has been on the hurricane all week. Floyd. It came ashore in North Carolina this morning and they keep showing rain going sideways and people stuck on the highway for hours trying to get away from it. A girl from Kayenta next to me said, "All those people are running away from water."

We haul Grandma's water in barrels in the back of Uncle Ray's truck. We watch the sky all summer for rain. It's hard to picture having too much of it. I hope those people are all right. I hope their grandmas got out.

My cousin Tina got married Saturday! At the church in Chinle, and then everybody went over to the chapter house for the reception. Grandma gave two sheep for the wedding and the aunties were cooking from before the sun came up: mutton stew, frybread, roast corn, a sheet cake from Gallup with "Tina & Jerome" in blue frosting. I made frybread for about three hours. I have flour in my ears still. Tina looked so beautiful in her velvet blouse and her grandmother's turquoise that I had to go stand by the coffee for a minute.

First dance was "Amazed." Then the DJ played "Livin' la Vida Loca" and Grandma's sister Rose, who is 81, got up and danced with Jerome's little brother and nobody could stop her.

Darrell drove up from Phoenix for it. Almost six hours each way. That's how he is. He looked good in his black shirt and he two-stepped with every auntie who asked. Then Auntie Bea said, loud, "So when is yours?" and Darrell said, "Ask her," and everybody at the table turned around and looked at me with a mouth full of cake.

He drove back Sunday morning. We didn't talk about it. We talked about the Diamondbacks.

Here is the embarrassing part. I understand Navajo. I grew up with Grandma talking to me in it every summer. But I answer in English, always have. My mom went to boarding school, where they got punished for speaking it, so at home she spoke English to us kids on purpose. She thought she was giving us something. She was, I guess. She was also taking something, and she knows it, and we don't talk about that either.

So this semester I'm in Diné Bizaad with a bunch of eighteen-year-olds, and some of them speak better than me. The boy who sits next to me is from Lukachukai and talks to his grandpa every day and helps me with my sounds without making me feel stupid. Mrs. Y. made each of us stand up and introduce ourselves the right way, with our clans. I know my clans. I have known them my whole life. I still said them in English in my head first and then translated, which is backwards.

Today we did verbs for handling things. In Navajo you don't just "give" somebody something. The verb changes if it's a round thing, or a long skinny thing, or a rope, or something in a container. I told Grandma this on Saturday and she said, "Well, of course," like I'd told her water is wet.

Friday afternoon at Grandma's the wind came up out of the southwest all at once, and when I looked out the door the whole sky over there was brown, a wall of it, eating the hills one at a time. Grandma was already tying her scarf. We ran the sheep into the corral with the dogs going crazy and the dust hit before I got the gate chained. Dirt in my teeth, dirt in my ears, dirt in the sugar bowl. You can't see your own hand. The goats screaming like they were being murdered, which they weren't.

Twenty minutes later the rain came right behind it and turned everything we'd just breathed into mud. Then the smell. If you have never smelled rain on the desert after a dust storm I don't know how to tell you. It smells like the ground is thanking somebody.

The road was soup by six. I stayed over. Grandma made potatoes and eggs and we listened to KTNN until the batteries ran down.

Registration today. Stood in line for two hours behind a guy with a toddler who wanted my car keys very badly. I let him hold them. Signed up for English 101, Navajo language, college algebra (help) and Navajo history.

Darrell called last night on his phone card. It was 112 in Phoenix. He was sitting in his truck with the air on because his apartment's AC was out again. He said, "See, you'd be the one who fixes stuff like this." I said I'm the one who fixes Grandma's stuff like this. He said, "Your grandma's got your uncles." Which is true and is also not how it works, and I don't know how to explain that to somebody who grew up in Phoenix and only comes up for funerals and rodeos.

Twenty minutes left on the card. We used it all talking about nothing, which is my favorite kind of talk with him.

Wilson, who runs the computer lab in the evenings and is nineteen and knows everything, showed me how to make a home page. He says all kinds of people keep journals on the internet now, just regular people writing about their regular lives, and strangers read them. I read three last night until the lab closed. A woman in Tijuana and San Diego. A man in Milwaukee who plays golf with his son. I felt less by myself.

So I'm trying it. I've kept a notebook since I was twelve. This is the same thing, except somebody might answer.

Things to know: I'm not an expert on anything. I'm not going to explain Navajo things that aren't mine to explain. This is just me, my grandma, her sheep, school, and one boyfriend three hundred miles away who wants me to be somewhere else.

Ahéhee' for reading.