A Tiny Box

In March 2017, Marta, a former teacher of mine arrived in Lisbon. She had been to Colombia and told me that my friend Anna sent a package for me.

When I had met Marta, she handed me a tiny woven box, that fit in my palm. In it was a note and a pair of flower earrings. In the note Anna wrote to me how the earrings, I am inheriting from her, and the box, used to be a storage for her fallen tooth when she was a kid. Now, it travelled all the way to Lisbon for me, carrying the note, the earrings and the scent of flowers from her yard in Bogota.

As I read the letter, I had dreamt of visiting her not knowing when that will happen.

At the end of 2019, I found myself in Anna’s yard. I stayed with her for two months. I was not prepared for Bogota’s cold and my skin started to show its allergies. One afternoon, after learning from Anna’s old book of herbal remedies that boiled walnut leaves were good for the skin, we went to the entrance of her home and began picking leaves from their walnut tree. For three days, I would sit in a walnut bath for 30 minutes hoping that it would ease my rash. It did, eventually. I don’t know if it was the walnut bath or the happiness of realising that I had made it to Anna’s yard. The yard, she told me about in her little note.

But those days in Bogota are so far away now. Two days ago, I was cleaning my things and took out the tiny woven box. I found one of the earrings in it. I had lost the other pair while on a work trip once. I wear the earrings on special occasions, especially when I go to work, or when I think I would need luck. I do this because I think, it’s nothing short of a miracle how the earrings have found its way to me, and brought itself back to Bogota. One day I’ll wear the earrings again, when the time comes that I can leave the house, and it will again bring me to another place.