Author: Ruth Powell

Everyone wants a pretty eulogy.  They want a happy-ever-after that does not involve a misspelt tattoo or a death due to a selfie stick.  The people who designed and built the Duomo wanted to be remembered well.  But the rest of us don’t want to be overlooked either.

“That’s all very interesting,” said Alice “but what are you going to do about Harris?”

“Harris?”

“Harris Blakely, who is sitting in seat 7G, on flight FR1977 from Riga to Dublin?  You’ve forgotten all about him haven’t you?”

“No, I just…”

“You just what?  You left him there on that plane with only a glass of white wine and his thoughts for company.  Are you going to leave him there, indefinitely, flying around in the turbulent sky, with no hope of denouement?”

“No, I just…”

“So what are you going to do with him?  Maybe it was all a dream or the wink of an eye of a rabbit in a well-kept garden in Connecticut?  Something has to happen to the man.  A plane crash perhaps, although that’s very melodramatic and expected, perhaps then a sense of unease or a realisation of sorts, a moment of unexpected joy even?”

I didn’t reply.

I thought about Harris.

He was being seduced by a memory of his early years with Rachel, when they first fell in love.  The memory came into his mind with the radiance of a new emotion, as if it were the first time the event was happening to him.  He remembered a short holiday in Florence, when they were first together, and yes, that’s right, there was a thunderstorm.  He and Rachel had been out all day and were exhausted, so they stayed in their room to enjoy the storm’s spectacle.  They were drinking Peroni from the bottles and they couldn’t believe the view they had.  This was just a cheap little hostel, but it came with that view.

Some view.

They kept the green, wooden, bedroom shutters open, and marvelled at the light show nature was putting on for them.  Occasionally, they would tip toe outside to the balcony for cigarettes, but they mostly just lay on the bed, talking until the sun came up.  Retaining that memory for Harris, was as comforting as melted butter on toast, from an open fire.

If the truth were known Harris was enjoying this peaceful time on the plane.  He rarely spent any time alone so he was quietly delighted that Rachel was sitting a few rows behind him.  It was relaxing.

He knew that his marriage was ending, and that they were both simply too polite to end it.  They were tentatively walking around the corpse of the relationship, but it was starting to smell, and someone was going to have to mention it.  He should do it, and as soon as they got home to Dublin, he would do it.  Yes.  If he took control of this, it might be easy to finalise.  With the decision made, he felt much better and even the turbulence now didn’t disturb him.

Rachel remembered the same night of the thunderstorm in Florence too.  But it was with sadness that she thought of the end of their marriage.  Perhaps it wouldn’t end quite yet, perhaps they would have another holiday, or another Christmas, surely it wouldn’t end in the nearest of futures.  She had loved their lives together.  She had loved the time.

When the most attractive of the cabin crew offered Rachel a drink, she shook her head.  She had stopped drinking six years ago so it was hardly a temptation anymore. Rachel was also enjoying sitting alone without Harris.  She tried to read her magazine, but it was futile with the turbulence, so she drifted away from thoughts of dead relationships, and onto living stories instead.

Rachel liked to make up stories for her young students.  One particular group, who were having a hard time with the literature on the curricula, loved to hear the stories she created, and so the deal was this:  Rachel would tell them a story at the end of class, but they had to summarise it “in their own words” for homework.  Before the short mini-break to Riga, the girls had been enjoying one called “Floatation”.

Three people lived on Floatation, and they all had very different jobs.

Sujilth was the swimmer, and it was her job to swim out from Floatation every morning to collect debris or living fish.  Debris included old bits of wooden furniture that hadn’t eroded yet; a photograph, pieces of plastic and the occasional piece of jewelry.  While Sujilth’s main job was to collect living fish, she enjoyed the debris more, so she left Floatation early every morning and she swam back home before the sun went down.

Sujilth always gave the debris to Grandfather to catalogue.  He named the things, told her what they had been used for Before the Final Flood, and kept them for safekeeping.

“People will want a record of what happened before” he would say, but she wasn’t sure.

Why would people would want a record?

Which people?

They used to see other people, and other Flotations quite often, but they hadn’t seen anyone for four full moons now.  She knew also that there were less and less living fish, and that Xeros was nervous.

Xeros was a boy, perhaps the same age as Sujilth, but taller and more beautiful.  He had a long neck and long toes, and she admired him.  He had much nicer skin than hers, because he didn’t go swimming so it wasn’t all crispy, but she was better at counting.

Every day she took the living fish back to him and he would decide to either cook them or else keep them in the clean water tank.  Breeding and barbequing fish were his obsessions.  She didn’t like it when he was angry about the lack of fish she caught, she preferred it when he kissed her and told her that she was beautiful too.

Yesterday, Sujilth brought back a plastic bag, some diamonds and another telephone.  Grandfather laughed and tried to explain that Before the Final Flood, the telephone and the diamonds would have been the most valuable of the three finds.

Now he just needed the plastic bag, to collect the rain, should it come again.  Or to burn it for a fire.

“Tell me more about the telephones and the diamonds” Sujilth asked, as she loved his stories at the end of the day.  But Grandfather was tired.  Xeros didn’t want to be distracted either as he was cutting the fish and removing the skin.

“Please tell me more…” she said, “tell me more”.

Grandfather said “I would love to, my sweet thing, but do you know that my memory is less reliable than melted butter on toast, on an open fire”.

“I long to tell you more about butter and ice-cream and chocolate sauce and pineapples.  I would give my soul to hear a dog bark in the night time or the sound of  a door closing.  I’d like to hear a church bell or even the sound of an ambulance would be nice.  I would like to feel something instead of floating.  Something solid and still instead.  But we need other people, we need other fish”.

 

Many of you will remember the blog I wrote, in which I tried to encourage you all to see the other side of Donald J Trump.  I wanted you to look at him through a telescope of fairness, objectivity and possibly even kindness.  Many of you will also remember how I suffered because of the special relationship I have with the 45^th President of the United States.  And many of you will indeed remember how I lost my job, my long term partner, and many of my friends when I went public with my thoughts.

Well let me just tell you right now, it’s been a nightmare of a witch hunt!  I am still in hiding in a secret location in Kilkenny, and I’m at the end of my tethers.  I can’t even show myself at my Bikram Yoga class, let alone Spinning.  Yet, despite all of the sorrows, I’m still pleased I said what I did, and do you know what, I have even more to say about the other side of Donnie.

Donald John Trump was born on 14 June in 1946 to Fred and Mary-Anne who were, like all new parents, just thrilled.  Only a few hours after his birth, however, Mary-Anne suffered excruciating postnatal depression, which manifested itself in the most unusual way.  Mary-Anne thought Donnie was a chinchilla and refused to have him in the home with his other siblings, so he was sent to live with Uncle John Trump, who was a professor at MIT, and all too keen to study the young baby.

Professor John put baby Donnie in an enclosure in Boston Zoo with a few lemurs and a family of sloths, and the young boy spent the first seven years of his life, essentially living with primates.  It was Professor John’s idea that Donnie would be able to educate the other animals.  Well of course, what happened was, that it was they who taught Donnie how to act, rather than the other way around.  So, Donnie spent his first seven years eating, grooming, sleeping and playing with the other fury creatures, essentially acting like, and thinking he was, a chinchilla.

Well you can just imagine what this would do to a small boy, I mean really the poor thing!  The first seven years of his life, can you just imagine that?

On his 7^th birthday Mary-Anne went to see him at Boston Zoo.  She took the other children and she thought she would make a day of it as she was hoping for a family portrait.  However, when she saw him she was so shocked by how like a real chinchilla Donnie was acting, that she demanded he be released into her care immediately.  She took him right home, and started to look after him, as mother should.

When Donnie first moved back into the apartment in Queens, with Fred, Mary-Anne and all the other Trumps, there was a transitional period where everyone had to get used to him.  Obviously, he couldn’t go to school, the child wasn’t even house trained at this stage, and he still liked to climb up the curtains, so Mary-Anne suggested that he might like to take up professional wrestling and she enrolled him in a local gym.

At the beginning this worked out very well for Donnie.  He loved the physicality and freeness of the sport, and he quickly learned his new craft. The gym guys liked him and he picked up English quite quickly and he slowly put away his chinchilla habits.  He started eating at the table, sleeping in a bed at night time, and he controlled the jumping.  By the time of his eighth birthday, he was acting like a real boy and ready for his first live evening fight in the ring, with an audience and everything.

Sadly however, on the evening of the fight, he registered his wrestling name as “Kleine Kaninchennase” out of respect to his Germanic roots.  He thought the name meant “German Menace” when it actually translated as “Little Rabbit Nose”, so when he went into the ring he was met with laughter and taunts from the audience.  “Little Rabbit Nose!” they shouted “Little Rabbit Nose!”

Remember this was back in 1953!

Well I mean this just brought back all the memories of the primate enclosure right back to him.  All the work at the gym, with the wrestling and language acquisition and toilet training vanished, and this little boy, who was still only eight years of age, was now permanently damaged.

He would never be the same.

So I don’t care that the public doesn’t understand me!  I have empathy for that little boy who grew up to the be the 324^th richest man on the planet.  Money doesn’t replace a mother’s love, or peer support, or going to school with the other little boys and girls.  Money can’t buy love and my hear just bleeds, when I think about the other side of Donnie.

It just bleeds.

 

 

 

 

Ho Chi Minh City is filled with motorbikes, street vendors, Pagodas and noodle soup.  From the skyscrapers, you see its urban residents move up and down the allies, across the rivers and through the parks.  Ho Chi Minh City wakes up early and doesn’t stagnate until late that same night.  Ho Chi Minh City sleeps lightly.

But I’m not there now.

I am on a floating house in a mangrove forest, where monkeys steal food and pigs run between trees.  A rooster crows.  The river is so low that my floating house rests on the muddy, soft, riverbed, while crabs and lungfish fight over the insects remaining.  By night, the tide will be high again, elevating my house up higher while the roots of the mangroves will protect the village inland, from the sea.

And I am not there now.

I am on a sampan on the Mekong Delta and we are moving slowly.  The stroke of the single oar fractures the silence, and no one can see us.  Not long after, I am in the vicinity of sleep in a hammock on a salt farm.  Filled with fish and rice wine, it is too hot to be outside, so I rest here while the owner of the household smiles on kindly.  She finds my tiredness entertaining, and she is happy I enjoyed the lunch.

I am there now.

At the Darsena beach café bar, there is only now.

A white tipped wave comes up to the sand and says…“I’m sho shorry, did I dishturb you?”…but you shake your head twice at him.

If you had more energy you would wink.

Your head lies in the water and your hairs float towards the horizon like tentacles of an octopus.  You feel the ambrosial warm water pulling you.  A grey fish lies near you.  He’s too dead to throw back in the sea, but you notice his one gill is moving.

His Picasso eyes stare at you, but there is nothing now, at the Darsena beach café bar.

 

All eyes were on my social media platforms last week when it emerged that it was I, Ruth Powell, who was the mystery, long-standing, close friend and advisor of Donald Trump, President-elect of the United States of America.  When the details of our close intimate friendship were leaked to the public, I had to leave my apartment in Dublin and hide out in a B&B in Kilkenny.  Friends, family and people I have never met said that they were “outraged”, “shocked”, “numb” and “in pieces” when they heard about the relationship.  Only one woman from Donegal commented that she felt “peaceful”.  Of course, it later came-out that she was actually responding to a posting of mine on the ancient Japanese art of Shirin Yoko, or forest breathing; so she re-posted her comment again with the words “peaceful, my arse!” just to clear things up.

Many couldn’t believe, that I, Ruth Powell, long term development worker, teacher and friend of the oppressed, could have been hiding my relationship with a man that so many feel contempt for.  Well let me just say a few things from my point of view and dispel many of the evil myths and lies that have been circulating around this story once and for all.

Let me just tell you all about the other side of Donnie.

I met Donald Trump in the autumn of 2006, that part is true.  But we certainly did not meet at a Halloween themed party at the Playboy Mansion.  I’ve never even been to California.  No, Donnie contacted me when I was working as a VSO volunteer in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and he asked me if he could join me for a couple of weeks, a month maximum, as he had an interest in working with people from less fortunate positions than his own.  I was surprised at first, but over a few emails I heard a real longing from a lost soul, and I thought, “heck, why not invite him over for a few weeks, how bad can it be?”

Well let me just say this once, he did not stay in my apartment near the wrestling palace, as has been stated in media!  No sir.  Donnie didn’t want to live in an apartment in town so he chose to live in a traditional Mongolian ger, ten kilometres from the city centre.  He spent his days playing with the children from a local orphanage, working with the local women’s farmer’s association, delivering training sessions to the LGBTQ working group and teaching the homeless how to read and write.  I would visit Donnie in the evenings, and I never saw such dedication to the eradication of inequality.  The man was a beast.  He would stay up all night learning the Mongolian language and practising his throat singing ability, and whenever we finished our dinner, he would take out the left overs and give them to the street children.  He was unstoppable, dynamic, passionate and inspiring.

After a month he went back to the States, but not until he set up a fund for women from vulnerable backgrounds to set-up their own small businesses.  He also established a library in the university, and presented cheques to local NGOs.  When I asked if I could take a photo of all this great work, he simply said “no Ruth, let’s keep this quiet”.  When he returned to New York he sent me a wonderful thank you letter, in which he quoted Shakespeare and Chaucer, and finished it with an elegant haiku.

We stayed in touch after that and yes, it’s true that he has asked my advice on a number of occasions.  It was I, Ruth Powell, who suggested he run for President and yes, I was asked for my opinion on his hair-style, clothes, wives and political policies.  But we never actually again met in public, simply via email and Facebook and he sometimes tweets me.

Late at night, he sometimes tweets me.

When the story of our decade long friendship broke there were such vicious undertones that I simply had to respond.  Many call Trump a callous, manipulative sociopathic-megalomaniac , but those people never did see him playing barefoot, with the children, under the constant blue Mongolian sky.  Those people never saw him laughing and they simply don’t know Donnie like I know Donnie, and it’s those people that I feel sorry for.  Those people indeed!

 

 

“It’s not pleasant, but it’s not dangerous” said the most attractive of the cabin crew to Harris Blakely, who was sitting in seat 7G, on flight FR1977 from Riga to Dublin.  Harris was not a natural flyer, nor was he enjoying this particular batch of turbulence, but he wanted to let her know that he disliked his fellow passengers in seats 7D and E far more than his fear of flying.  Instead, he returned the smile and said “can I have another white wine please?” and the steward nodded.

The couple in seats 7D and E were obscenely annoying.

They were young, beautiful, confident and well-dressed and were very much in love with one another.  Harris disliked them both, but in particular the young woman due to her incessant chewing of gum.  He could hear the sound of the chewing, like boots walking through squelshy melted snow, and he could smell each tiny spearmint droplet.  He felt as if he were inhaling her, and it disgusted him.

The couple had been staring out of the window all through take-off, out over the Baltic sea and towards Finland.  But now they were staring at one another, stroking the others hands and smiling far-away smiles.  Harris took the opportunity to close the plastic shutter on the window.  He opened the bottle of wine and poured half of it into the plastic cup.

Harris looked behind him to his wife, who was sitting four rows back in seat 15B, and there she was smiling at him immediately, which made him feel as though he were being watched.  There had been a mix up at check in, but Harris didn’t mind the separation of rows on the way home, after the disastrous holiday.  It gave him time to sit alone and think.  He smiled back at his wife and she blinked in return.  When they first met Harris loved the way she blinked, he found it sweet and endearing and amusing, but nowadays he just hated it.  There were times when he just wanted to shout at her to just stop blinking all the time, but he used his powers of restraint and kept his irritations to himself.

Harris and his wife, the blinker in seat 15B had been in love at the beginning, because Rachel remembered it.

Rachel remembered hearing about him before they met, and even when they did meet, she heard his voice in the garden before she saw his face.  When they did finally speak, at the end of the sunny barbeque in a garden yard in Rathmines, it took seven seconds before she fell in love with him.  She loved everything about him without a delay.

He was a little drunk from the wine, and soon he said to her, “I’m going to kiss you now” and she liked it.

“Now?” she asked.

“Well either now or not now” he shrugged, so she leaned in close next to him and kissed him.

But 19 years later and they were nearly middle aged anyway.

The holiday had been a failure.  While Rachel had enjoyed the walking tours of Riga’s old town and took plenty of photographs of the Gothic and Nouveau Riche architecture, Harris just stayed in small bars and cafés, read his books and ignored her.  She tried local sausage and fish, he ate from McDonalds, she went to folk music and dancing evenings, he stayed in the hotel and watched satellite TV.

Rachel didn’t mind that they weren’t like the newly in love couple sitting next to Harris on this flight, but she missed the barest of intimacy.  She wanted to see him laugh again, to feel him close again, to hear him say again that he wanted to kiss her, either now or not now.  She missed the physical feeling of love, the sensation of falling, feeling like floating, or like a feeling of turbulence, and she missed the sense of not being alone.

She just didn’t know what to do to change it.

 

 

 

 

Usually, when you invite your friends over for dinner, on an innocent Saturday evening, you don’t expect it all to end with fire engines and ambulances outside of your home.  You don’t expect to see the neon blue lights of the emergency vehicles reflect onto the faux gothic stone work of the church opposite.  You don’t expect it to happen, but it does.

And at other times, you don’t expect a Sunday afternoon to end with the sight of an old woman falling on the pavement right in front of you.  Her leg bursts open silently and her blood decants down the slope of her shin, like watered down cranberry juice.  She looks at you directly, because you remind her of her niece in Arizona, but her lips have turned blue and she’s afraid.  You don’t expect it to happen, but it does.

And usually, when your friend from Eritrea, (let’s pretend she’s from Eritrea), calls you up on a Monday, and invites you out for tea, you don’t expect her to ask you to buy a small pill on the internet, which will take the fertilised egg away from her body.  You don’t expect it to happen, but it does.

You purchase the pill and you watch it travel north from Mumbai towards the small post office in East Wall, through the tracking device on DHL. On the day you go to collect it, the woman there says “mild weather for this time of year” and you smile.  You sit on the bench nearby and hold the package in front of you, and wonder if you’re both plunging into harm’s way.

But your friend, let’s just still pretend she’s from Eritrea, says thank you and holds your hands tightly.  She says that this autumn is falling into place now.  She tells you that September smells the same no matter what age you are, that it smells of back-to-school leather satchels, coffee and the fragrance “Beautiful” by Estēe Lauder.  She reminds you that no one was hurt in the fire, and that the woman recovered well after her fall.  She tells you that what you are doing is not sinister or toxic, and that everything will be well with this pill.

She says everything will be well with this pill.

 

 

 

 

Sometimes it’s easier to tell the story backwards, to begin at the end and start with the finish, so that it all makes more sense in reverse when the colours are clearer.  At the end of it all, there was Liz.

Liz was the one who found me at the edge of the paragraph, on the corner of a street, in a small town in Spain.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here” I said to her slowly and she replied “I know baby, that happens sometimes”.

I didn’t want to leave the deliciously icy cool air conditioning and the quiet setting of the car hire shop, because it was nice there.  But Liz gently encouraged me to go, and we left.

Walking back to the room I forgot Liz’s name.  Or rather I knew her name well, I just didn’t know what to do with it.

I reminded Liz of a fox she’d seen weeks before, walking down a city street in Dublin, an hour before dawn.  He was a solitary, red fox, with the triangular ears and long bushy tale of a children’s book.  He was mature and if he could have talked, he would have also said “I don’t know what I’m doing here”.

He was disorientated and lost and he knew that this night wouldn’t bring forth a feast of field mice and chickens, but bits of old pizza slices and pies instead.  A less specialised diet, and one that required more scavenging than hunting.

He may have been half-heartedly looking for a den as he was too far away from the fields to go home.  His slender coat of auburn fur glistened under urban street lamps rather than the shine of the moon, and he hid in doorways when the late night taxi drivers drove past.

When we reached the room I rested.

I tried to let all the cement clouds and the pollution skies flutter away as I watched the salmon coloured sun set under my eyelids instead.  There the fox’s fur turned into the sacred orange robes of Buddhist monks, and he regained his magical spirit.  In that world, Liz came forth as a nursery school teacher, who liked to peel oranges and smelled ever so slightly of marzipan.

Just back to the beginning and more from the start, she was there again, and I remembered her name, but I still didn’t know what to do with it.

Latvia is more of a casual acquaintance than a very close friend.  You meet Latvia, on a Saturday afternoon, and you suggest going for coffee, but Latvia says “why don’t we take some beers instead?” So you do and you have a great time.  But you don’t need to call Latvia the next morning to say thank you, because Latvia knows you had a fun night out, in a bar with a toad in an aquarium.

Latvia is easy-going like that.

Some people say there is magic in the woods and between the trees, sssshhhh, can you hear it?

Latvia doesn’t feel jealousy, that most grim and lurid of all emotions.  Latvia doesn’t mind that you’ve been to other countries and that you’ve loved some other towns. Latvia is serene and composed like that.  Latvia is copacetic

There may be magic in the meadows, between the woods, ssshhhh can you feel it?

Let us lie down in the meadows. Let’s put garlands in our hair and let’s smell the soil which surrounds us.  Some people say you’ll feel better, that there’s magic in the woods, sssssshhhhh can you see it?

At least at the Gresham everything stays the same, thought Lydia as she ordered a pot of coffee for one.  The black velvet cushions, with the golden embroidered letter G’s on them, would always remain the same.  Here one could rely on the peacefulness of softly spoken voices, as an oasis of calm away from O’Connell Street.  Here one could relax.

The first time Lydia came to the hotel was shortly after her arrival in Ireland, almost three decades before.  She came in for Sister Ann, who said “if you do nothing else in Dublin, promise me you’ll have tea in the Gresham”.  And so she did.  A young naïve Ethiopian girl, ordering tea she didn’t like, for a promise to a missionary in a far-away land.

It was a long time and distance away from Ethiopia that Lydia was now.  And did it seem to be moving further along the horizon?

Sister Ann was Lydia’s English teacher back home in Bahar Dar.  She taught English songs, letters and even grammar to the children who lived down near the lake.  But the Sister had a special affection for Lydia and would brush her hair and give her extra pieces of injera at meal times.  Sister Ann was always reading aloud from the most obscure of text books, big smelly books with crusty jackets and strange curricular inside.  But Lydia loved to listen to the poems and the stories about animals most of all.  One of her favourite stories was about the lungfish of Ethiopia.

Tell me about the lungfish, tell me about the lungfish.

 “Lungfish can estivate, which means that they can spend the long hot dry season in a state of suspended animation, neither breathing nor eating, but simply hibernating under the mud, waiting for the rains to come, waiting for the time when they can go back to the water”.

Lydia’s pot of coffee arrived and the waiter asked “is there anything else Mrs O’Sullivan?” but she shook her head slightly and he glided away from the table.  She inspected her newly French manicured nails, as she placed a cube of sugar into her cup and poured coffee from the pot.  She liked the new nails, they were subtle and they elongated her fingers. She also glanced once more at her new Mary-Jane shoes, and admired them also.

Lydia stayed in contact with Sister Ann after she moved to Ireland.  She was homesick for the first half decade so she wrote the missionary long letters about every detail of her new life.  She wrote about the smells and tastes of Dublin, the food, the accents and the weather.  The letters would take months to travel to Bahar Dar, and more months again before the return letter would come back to Dublin.  Ann would write about news from the Lake, how the other children were, what the fishermen were catching, how the rainy season was effecting the maise crops.  She wrote about injera, chicken wats and music.

Lydia would tell gossip from the Church and the congregation, Ann would write about the mountains and the new hotels being built.  Lydia would describe the shops on Parnell Street, which were starting to sell yams and plantains.  Ann would explain how tourists from Europe were beginning to come to Bahar Dar for their holidays, that they were staying in the new hotels with views over Lake Tana.

For some reason Ann always seemed sadder around Easter time, so Lydia would always make a special letter for this time, full of promises and flowers, drawings and sometimes poems.

After a decade, Lydia started writing about a man in the Church who was starting to smile at her knowingly.  He was a little older, but he was a kind and decent man and his name was William.  The letters slowed down for a while after that, while Lydia concentrated on marriage and children, and correspondence was kept to greeting cards.  But when the children left for college, and William left her for someone else in the congregation, she found that she had more time for writing and reading letters again.

It was then she started visiting the Gresham more frequently.  Her ritual involved coffee, correspondence and sometimes cake.  Strangely, it was at the Gresham that she felt most at home at.  Even after almost three decades Ireland didn’t feel like home, but only a place where she lived.  It wasn’t a bad life, no indeed not, and she as very grateful for her blessings and thanked God regularly.  It just wasn’t what was promised, that was all.

When technology suggested that the women could replace paper and pens with emails or Skype, the two women kindly ignored it.  They kept to their old ways and wrote pages of news to one another, in almost identical handwriting on good quality smooth paper, with matching envelopes.  Theirs were not the words of emails.

Lydia wrote about the changes in Dublin, how one saw more homeless people now than before and how the young people seemed to be so different.  Ann wrote about the rude tourists in Bahar Dar and how they were quite hostile to local people at times, and how they sometimes drove like maniacs.  Then one day Lydia noticed, almost by accident, that she had started addressing the old missionary and friend as simply “Ann”.

The final letter Lydia received from Ann came in February.  She wrote about the new road from Addis to Bahar Dar and how it made the journey so much easier.  She also wrote about her plans for Easter and how she hoped to finish her ministry by that time, and have more time for her own projects.  But the part of the letter Lydia loved to read and re-read came at the very end.

“But my dearest Lydia the strangest of all things occurred two nights ago, and I wonder if you’ll even believe me.  I was taking my evening walk, at the shore of Lake Tana, while the sun was setting and the fishermen were bringing their boats in.  When what should I see but a lungfish!  He was covered so safely in the mud and I suspect he was hibernating through this long dry spell.  I suspect he was waiting for the rains to come, and I hope he will make it back to the water”.

Lydia put the letter on her lap, smiled at the waiter and thought of her friend back home in Bahar Dar.