As I was driving home, a flock of blackbirds fell out of the sky. It was a diving swarm, a single ball of coordinated black spots bouncing against the gray clouds. They didn’t need to speak to know in which direction to go; they didn’t bump into each other even at their frenzied speed. Rather, they flowed like a torrential stream, pooling at choice points in the sky. They moved as one, a larger consciousness, a group of wandering nomads who already knew that they would arrive together at their ultimate destination, the journey together being more important than the endpoint.

I was open but not searching. They stole my breath away, and in an instant, I was plummeting through the skies with them, swooping, my heart in my throat, a smile in my eyes. They welcomed my spirit into their flock. I was soaring. We settled on the field. I was home.

As he felt the snow give way underneath his feet, time slowed or maybe his brain functions quickened, like a tape recording being played fast forward. In any case, the fall one hundred meters into the crevasse gave ample opportunity for random thoughts. He ricocheted from one glacier wall to the other, clawing at ice, leaving bits of skin from his fingers along the surface in homage. He had just resigned himself to the impossibility of slowing his descent, when he stopped sliding with a jolt, feet still hanging in the air. The space between the glacier walls had funnelled down to a width narrower than that of his torso and backpack combined, thus breaking his fall.

Adrenaline coursed through his veins, and taking stock of the situation, he was more than grateful to be conscious and still able to breathe. He tried throwing a sideways glance below him and saw what looked like a huge ice cavern, the ceiling of which was just a few dozen feet below. If he had not been wearing his backpack, he would have slipped straight through to certain death.

The good news was that he had rope. The bad news was that he had the rope, and not his climbing partner above, who hadn’t stopped hurling his cries after him as he plummeted. The worst news was that the rope was in the backpack that was currently bearing all his weight and was impossible to access wedged as he was. What a sardonic second chance he had been given.

My friend once told me a heartbreaking story.

As is typical of mothers with school-aged children, she had befriended the mother of one of her son’s classmates, a frail and innocent young girl. During a chance sighting on the street, her family doctor had noticed her paleness and had suggested that her mother bring her in for testing. The day after the results were received, she was admitted to the hospital with leukaemia, but the family, at first, tried to remain optimistic with a 75% positive prognosis.

Little by little, her health and hope for recovery dwindled, like wisps of smoke disappearing into thin air. No one who had volunteered samples for a bone marrow transplant was compatible with her, and her condition had deteriorated so much that the doctors refused to register her on the international list for bone marrow donors.

With summer came the girl’s sixth birthday. She was all skin and bones and had to wear diapers for lack of control over her bodily functions. The night she died, she called her father to come to her. She asked him to take off her diapers and bring her to the toilet because she didn’t want “to be a baby anymore.” While she was sitting there, held up by her dad, she said, “Daddy, do you know how much I love you?” and clung to his neck for strength and comfort. She died right there in his arms.

My friend’s son, who was only five, didn’t want to believe that she had really died, because she was just a kid and kids weren’t supposed to die. He needed to hear it directly from his friend’s Mom, and so he climbed in her lap and asked, “Is it really true? Did she really die?” Through the tears, she answered that it was true.

After thinking for a minute, he said, “You know those bones that stuck out of her back?”

In a simple, down to earth way, her mother answered, “Well, you know she was really thin and weak at the end, and you could see her shoulder blades.”

“No,” he insisted, “you know those bones, those were her wings that were growing, because now she’s an angel.”

*****

You could save a life through bone marrow donation to leukemia victims. Read more about it here.

As a child living in Maine, I learned to live with bitter winters. Some say it forges character; I tend to think it is the reason I escaped to a warmer climate as soon as I possibly could.

One breath-freezing afternoon in early winter, however, I recall strolling courageously across an iced-over pond near my house, which was a breeding ground for squadrons of mosquitos in warmer weather. The stretches of frosty gray ice were outlined by a fringe of evergreens where land stood. Everything had closed up for winter, and the frozen pond, in its barreness, creaked under my weight, as if warning me not to tread upon it. The smell of woodsmoke hung in the air, and the North Wind whistled across the frozen pond, stinging my ears until they were numb. Even though I was bundled up well, I could feel the biting chill through my winter garb.

Seeing myself as Dorothy Hamill, I attempted a few pirouettes on the soles of my boots, ecstatic to be literally walking on water. Clearing off the wind-blown snow with my mitten, I tried to peer through the ice and the air bubbles dancing just under the surface, into the inky blackness, wondering how anything could survive in the depths below. Yet, my fisherman neighbor regularly pulled out his wriggling catch through the hole he bored in the ice. This gave me hope. It proved that life could persist in the most inhospitible of environments, provided you stay away from the hooks.

Traipsing back to my house, I watched the charcoal smoke from the chimney soar upward and then, mesh with the cold greyness of the sky. I rushed home to be on the other side of that chimney, keeping warm while waiting for the day I could escape.

As a little girl, barefoot and wild, with pine needles caught in my mane, finding a wishing stone was tantamount to unearthing buried treasure. For those who may have been deprived of these pleasures, a wishing stone is any kind of rock that has one or several unbroken rings encircling it, but most importantly, each ring entitles its holder to a wish. Squeezing it tightly in my palm, I would close my eyes and whisper my heart’s desire to the stone, empowering it to work its invisible magic. Part of the ritual would then be to throw it as far away as possible, preferably into a body of water so that its ricochets would form expanding rings on the surface, mimicking its own.

While I recognize how very lucky I am today, sometimes, there just aren’t enough wishing stones in our lives. So, to thank each and every one of you for everything that you have given me through this blog, I want to give you here the magic of a wish with this stone. Take it and whisper your heart’s desire to it in the form of a comment. Who knows? We all could use a little magic.

My grandmother used to spend her afternoons making quilts, fitting pieces of our lives together like a puzzle. My brother’s outgrown shirt, my torn skirt, my parent’s worn sheets all served as raw materials to her creations. Fuelled by her Yankee work ethic of waste not, want not, she tied us together with matriarchal thread. I used to love to watch the shiny thimble balance on the end of her knotted fingers as they weaved the needle so expertly back and forth, resulting in what could only be qualified as a patchwork masterpiece, love in every stitch.

At 92, my grandmother is now fraying, coming apart at the seams. Pieces are missing from the quilt that is her life, and her simple forgetfulness has given way to total confusion and blank stares. She sits bewildered, befuddled, no longer recognizing us, but there is no solution to this quandary. To comfort her, I raise the quilt a little higher around her shoulders, surrounding her with pieces of us, wrapping her in her puzzlement.

Dear Brent (sweet love of my life),

After our three years (of paradise) together, these last few (dark) days have been (unbearably) strange (and painfully lonely) without you around. You are often (no, constantly) in my (obsessive) thoughts, but we both (except me) agree that it’s (not any) better this way. We (surely) want different things. We’ve grown apart (you flew the coop). This just wasn’t (what I) meant to (say) be(cause I’m missing you so much). After all, being single is like riding a bike, right? You never forget how (to feel alone and rejected).

I’m writing because (I’m desperate and) you left behind a few things (like your brand on my heart and my empty arms). I’m not sure whether you could come over (and try being “us”again) or if I should drop them off (the face of the Earth—myself included)?

What can I (possibly) say (to make you change your mind)? I (don’t) understand (at all) how you feel, and I hope we can still be friends (and lovers and grow old together). Let’s do lunch (and dinner and breakfast and tea and late-night-popcorn-in-front-of-the-tv-huddled-together-under-a-blanket) sometime.

(In)Sincerely yours (forever),
D.

(P.S. Please hear what I’m not saying.)

Venus has big, dark, sad eyes and a playful disposition, as black labs often do. This afternoon, we bolted from home at top speed and ran along the road, as if trying to escape from something, dodging the cool raindrops that had begun to fall. My feet were wet in my tongs and made squishing noises as I walked; her paws clicked along the warm tar that had begun to release its earthy rain smell. The freshness of the water falling on my head felt like a soothing balm.

We met another dog along the way that was within the confines of his yard. They touched their wet noses through the holes in the fence in greeting and tried playfully to find a way to be together, excited by this moment of complicity where they perchance found another being like themselves.

Several small tugs on the leash reminded her that we had to go on, but she kept stopping to look back as the other called after her with painful yelps. We made it back just before the deluge. Venus curled up in a ball and fell asleep, dreaming of sunbeams in wide open spaces.

This lost corner of Tanzania was the closest thing to an inferno that Nicole had ever experienced. She had arrived at the Benaco refugee camp from Belgium the week before on her mission as a nurse with the International Rescue Committee, her baggage brimming with naïveté, faith and a desire to change the world, Florence-Nightingale-style. Hiding behind her mask of professionalism and her latex gloves, her sterile first encounters with the inhabitants of the overrun camp consisted of brief triage and first aid. She had been prepared for this–intellectually, in any case. She had read the documents dryly accounting for the 800,000 Tutsi men, women and children who had been brutally murdered in Rwanda over the course of one hundred spring days in 1994. Within four months, a quarter of the country’s pre-war population had either died or fled the country. Half a million of them swarmed to this hive, the world’s largest refugee camp, just over the Tanzanian border.

At around midnight on the tenth day of Nicole’s assignment, when the rays of the sun had stopped assailing her limbs like lead weights, her attention was drawn to a corner of the makeshift infirmary where she worked. A little boy, no older than seven, sat staring into space, his eyes glazed over. She approached him as she would a wild animal, crouching with a hand extended. She noticed a gash in his leg and lured him out with some dried apricots left from her rations.

“What’s your name?” she asked in French.

“Issiaka.”

“Can I take a look at your leg?”

He nodded slowly, chewing the apricots deliberately, savoring every bite.
She led him by the hand to a place where the lamplight was brighter. The wound, crimson flesh between ebony skin, was wide and gaping, like a mouth screaming for mercy. She used a local anaesthetic, even though she had been instructed to save it for only the worst cases. Issiaka relaxed a little while she worked on his leg.

“Are you alone, Issiaka?”

He didn’t answer.

“You know, I haven’t been here very long. Maybe you could show me around?”
More silence. It was too late to try to make conversation.

She was nearly done closing the wound when his voice startled her.

“I’m afraid of the dark. It was night-time and I had to go to the toilet. The locusts started buzzing. That’s what woke me. They never sing at night. I was scared, but I had to go really bad.” He stared at the ground and hesitated. “Then, I heard noises, like a hundred rhinos, getting closer and closer. Have you ever seen a rhino?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I could feel the walls tremble from the rhinos’ heavy boots stomping the ground.” Painful silence alternated with his interjections. “Then, a lion came into the house. Papa fought him off with his bare hands, but the lion was too strong for him. He was brave, Papa…until the lion stabbed him with his sharp claws. Have you ever seen a lion?”

“No, I haven’t.” She continued to treat him slowly, her white hands ghostly against his dark skin. She kept her eyes low, unchallenging, so that he would feel comfortable enough to go on. After a moment, he did.

“A huge tiger killed my mother. She ran holding my little brother in her arms, screaming, trying to escape. She didn’t know that the animals were everywhere. The tiger knocked her down and crushed her. She cried and begged, but the tiger picked up my baby brother in his mouth. His teeth were very sharp. Have you ever seen a tiger?”

“No, Issiaka.” She fought to keep her voice steady as the nerves amassed to form a paralysing lump in her throat.

“You know, my sister Odette was hiding under the bed, but a gigantic snake found her. He took her away. He hissed and twisted around her, and carried her off. Odette loves animals, and they love her back. She’s always been good with them. She’s the one who takes care of the cows every day. They won’t give milk to anyone else but her…

“My brother, Hawas, was in the hallway. Well, his head was there, but I didn’t see the rest of him. Maybe the hyena took him. His eyes were looking at me under the door. I’m sure he saw me, but he didn’t say anything.

“I saw them all, but the animals didn’t see me. They forgot to look in the toilet. They roared terrible roars, but I was very quiet. They were furious and ferocious; I don’t know why. Maybe they were hungry. They fought everybody until there was no one left. But they didn’t see me. Sometimes I still hear their roars behind the drums. I can smell them, here in this camp.”

Nicole imagined the scene: Issiaka’s family silent and slumbering in the refuge of their home, fully expecting morning to arrive just like every other day of their existence, not suspecting that they were being stalked like prey. Little Issiaka rushed to answer the call of nature in a windowless space just before bestial chaos let loose in their midst. In a fraction of a second, strident and terrible screams escaped from the profound depths of the villagers’ bodies and pierced the air before dissipating in the ephemeral night mist, disembodied. The little village returned to corpse-filled silence, save a petrified seven-year-old child. Little Issiaka peered out through the rusty keyhole, hands clasping his mouth.

Nicole wiped the tears from her face, though she could never efface from her soul the fault line of this silent earthquake. She sought some way to exorcise these demons from Issiaka’s past. She fished in her backpack and pulled out a notebook and pencil and pushed it toward him.

“Draw them for me, Issiaka. Draw the animals.”

Issiaka took the pencil from her and furiously darkened the page with shadows. Inside the keyhole shape were savage fights between wild creatures: animals with human feet and human hands, rhinos with boots, lions with blades for claws… He could not accept that humans like him were capable of such monstrous slaughter, because all hope of trust would be annihilated. He drew in silence, in need. He didn’t speak of the weeks where he lived with hunger pangs in the bush under the protection of the wide fronds of a banana tree. Or how he had walked for miles to get to this place. Or how he had sustained the wound on his leg.

When he was done drawing, he asked to rest. Nicole put him in her cot. “Good night, Nkundabana,” he said.

“I don’t know this word. What does it mean?”

“It means a dear person who cares for children.”

Nicole caressed his hair lovingly until he closed his eyes; she felt her maternal instinct grow in the place of the lump in her throat. Issiaka slept for the first time since the tragedy without fear, taking his first steps towards healing, tracking and hunting the beasts from his past that continued to inhabit his mind.

There was a cheerful and busy atmosphere in that tidy, cozy kitchen, one that invited even a total stranger on a frigid day to warm his hands by the sturdy, boxy cooking stove that kept guard over all the happenings in the kitchen. Although it bore signs of wear, it often contained a blazing fire and on it sat a polished copper tea kettle that was stout and perky and whistled with all its might. Shiny, round, copper pots and pans, relatives of the tea kettle, adorned the walls. Plain, solid oak cupboards stretched from eye level upward to the lofty ceiling and held hundreds of chipped and cracked, well-used dishes with blue country patterns on them, but yellowed with age.

Below the cupboards stretched sideboards scrubbed spotless, scrubbed bare in some places. A long, deep specked double sink that was awkward and irregular in shape and size, yet practicle, sat below the window overlooking the porch, through which sunbeams sparkled and warmed the clean wooden planks of the floor. To the right of the sink was a heavy cast iron water pump that was painted a cheerful tomato-red. When coerced by hand, water would come gushing out and plummet to the sink below.

On the other side of the kitchen, a sturdy oval, mahogany table stood like a soldier reporting for duty and kept the stove company. The small pantry off the far side of the kitchen served as a perfect haven for rounds of hide-and-go-seek. Its walls were painted periwinkle-blue and the many overloaded shelves sagged under the weight of canned corned beef, fiddleheads and blackberry preserves. Strings of dried herbs hung from above, like precious memories stored in the corner of one’s mind. The odor of onions and musty potatoes, mixed with sugar and coffee grounds hung in the air.

The memory of this place reminds me of happy days and contentment, when a gingerbread cookie was enough to stop the tears from a skinned knee.