Long before the sun is up, the brooms come out. Along three dusty streets on the east side of Bucerías, neighbours sweep their stretch of road into neat arcs and lay the dust with water flung from plastic jugs.

The wind will undo all of it within the hour. Señora Alma sweeps anyway, and leaves a sprig of bougainvillea on a gate when someone is ill; Miguel wets the road and hums an old ranchera while he works.

Charlotte Smith explains what a swept threshold says, and to whom.

Every country runs on rules nobody thought to explain to you. Some are a pleasure to adopt — wishing the next table buen provecho on your way out never gets old. Some come with a backstory that wins you over, like the blood test several states still want before they will let you marry.

Some involve a museum guard, a purse that will not quite zip, and a pair of headphones that apparently pose a grave threat to the lamps. Herein, a highly selective approach to obeying them.

On the morning of September 11 Mark Arcuri was in New Mexico, calling his mother in New York, frightened for everyone he loved — and inside, in a way he had never had to notice: inside the country, inside the word we. The years after gave that word a terrible weight for the people it turned out not to cover.

25 years later, he writes now from a house in Querétaro, a residency card in his wallet and an accent that gives him away within a few sentences. He on the outside now, but how does it feel to have the roles reversed?

Some countries you cannot simply live in; you have to ride them.

A hotel terrace, a small disaster, a courtesy that arrives beautifully and helps not at all — and then an afternoon of bougainvillea and pink stone that makes the whole thing forgivable, until it doesn't. Everything is fine. Everything is emphatically not fine. Both, all day, on a rolling basis.