(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 7, 2017)

I always tell this story to others and to myself when something bad happens, the Taoist parable about the farmer who has only one horse and that horse runs away. The neighbors say, “such bad luck for you” and the farmer says “maybe” and then the horse returns with 10 new horse friends and the neighbors say then, “such good luck” and the farmer says “maybe.” Then the son breaks a leg trying to ride the wild horses and then the son escapes the draft because he has a broken leg. The neighbors never do get it right. The farmer never does decide if his luck is good or bad.

The problem is that life is so big and luck is so small. So when I was nine years old and left my favorite pendant, a mysteriously cloudy colored heart shape, hung on its chain at the corner of our yard’s wooden fence because I was leaving a sign to the universe that I wanted a life full of love adventures, a few days later the necklace vanished; and I knew even then, as I felt acute loss and for decades afterwards, (because my grandparents from Oregon gave me that pendant and I would never, ever see it again), even then I knew it was too early to know if the story was misfortune or good fortune, as some bird carried my heart flying toward some nest hundreds of yards or hundreds of miles away, (maybe even over all the states to Oregon), to a place where God only knows.