"Birdsong and laughter."

And the kindness of friends.

Ajijic willows. Graphite on paper. (C.M. Mexico, 2023.)

31 DECEMBER—My heart has never been so heavy as one year ends and another begins. This has been the saddest of years.

I never thought I would see a genocide unfold in real time and that no one, not one nation, would try to stop it—until South Africa stepped forward this week and filed a genocide claim against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Or, worse: that my own country, the United States, would be fully supporting it, providing much of the weaponry, and that those opposed to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza would be accused of being anti-Semites.

I write this looking out of a window onto an unfamiliar landscape, sitting in a chair in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar house.

We found ourselves homeless in the final month of this troublesome year. After a journey of nearly 3,000 miles, driving from central Mexico to Maryland, we arrived in Baltimore to take up residence in a house we had rented based on photos we had seen and discovered, upon entering it for the first time, that it was derelict. The moving truck, which arrived several hours before we did, had already unloaded everything.

I will never forget the telephone call I made to friends in Connecticut. “Sue Ann,” I began when she answered the phone, “we’re in trouble. The house we rented is uninhabitable. Can we stay with you for two weeks?”

“Yes,” she replied without hesitation. “We’ll have dinner ready for you tomorrow. You can tell us about it when you get here.”

That was six weeks ago. Since then, another friend opened her home to us and we are now in a small village in Massachusetts—still living out of suitcases and a car but with a roof over our heads, a comfortable bed, and a warm home in which we have marked the holiday season.

I am sad beyond reckoning and also aware of my good fortune.

Almost every morning of this year I woke up with a smile on my face listening to the sound of birdsong coming in through our open windows in Mexico. I miss the birds of Mexico. They made me feel at home on this planet and in my own body.

Birdsong and laughter. These are what lift my heart. I have never so fully appreciated the sound of human laughter—how it feels to let go and laugh—as I have this year.

At the end of a year full of so much sadness and confusion, brutality and injustice, it is birdsong and laughter and the kindness of friends that I pay homage to.

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