On our way back after spending Christmas at a lodge on a lakeside golf resort in the North, we passed a hunting party—riders, horses, and hounds—on their annual St. Stephen’s Day hunt. I thought of a poor fox in the near future: winter-lean, tongue lolling, assaulted and abused. St. Stephen’s Day is also Wren Day, when in the past a live wren was hunted and then tied to a staff, to be paraded through village and countryside. What is it about this day that fosters such barbaric spectacles of ritualised harrassment and death involving small hapless creatures?

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Mom emailed on Christmas Day, asking me if I miss her. (She also addressed me as Paulina, NOT my actual name.) I rang her the next day. Our phone calls, once every three or four months, are the only occasions I get any actual news from her, as her emails are short, almost perfunctory, though emoji-riven. This time I found out she has had a boarder for the last year, a young woman who works at the naval base. She also didn’t go to her sister’s for Christmas, even though she’s only a two-minute drive away, because she wanted to spend the day alone.

She was never much for the company of others. People were barely tolerated, including husband and children. My friends were not allowed to visit, and if they did visit, as in the week after my father’s death, she would treat them coldly. Afterwards I would never hear the end of it, as if I had betrayed her or committed some mortal sin. I don’t know why she’s like this, and sometimes I worry, when I feel anxious around others, that I’m becoming like her.

I didn’t though, did I? Immigrant, yes, but I ran away to follow my heart, even if my heart often broke down, oiled only by ludicrous expectations. I opened my self to the world, made home in unexpected places, learned as many names as I could, gobbled experience even if it was later, on afterthought, embarrassing. I risked, for the sake of the soul’s mysterious needs.

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