After spending a few days preceding my birthday in emergency rooms and in the hospital bed, my plans for a quiet celebration in a downtown spa went south. So, not to waste the day and to show how thankful I am to walk and breathe and feel at home in my body again, I took a long walk to the birch lake. I celebrated with sparkling maple water and a raspberry-lemon bar and received a gift of seeing a beaver for the first time ever. I recorded a birthday choral sang by a Tennessee warbler, an Indigo bunting and a few other birds. I’m not so stupid to believe that the universe turns around me, but I do believe that it is aware of my existence and as I start my fourty-eight’s tour around the universe, I feel deeply, immensely grateful.

On my birthday, just as I am heading out for a birthday walk,

I see the news about a 3 year old child killed not far away from my hometown.

If I died today, the people mourning me would have said

What a shame, she was too young to die.

Yet they, and I, find nothing to say about the three year old.

They say that the too young to die age depends on where you are born,

But in the place where I was born, people of all ages die every night for the most unnatural reasons.

Well, then, it depends on the willingness to leave the place of your birth, to detach yourself from the land, to be a foreigner, to look for someone in the crowd who at least understands your language,

To miss home while your home is crumbling away.

I am not judging myself or anyone

I’m just saying that grief is always an appropriate emotion.

13 years since I came to Canada. I have now lived here longer than in any other country, except the one I was born in. I’ve been here long enough to develop a memory. Remember, how things were before? Remember that New Year we met at the Old Port, freezing cold, drinking from champaign bottle? Remember how we ran that half-marathon, it was thirty degrees in the end of September and the city opened fire hydrants to cool us down? Remember how we would buy bran biscuits and bring to the park to feed squirrels. Completely illegal, I know, but we thought that bran would be good for squirrels.

I have now lived in this city longer than enough to have children here, to grow, no, not old, but older. And still I don’t know if I am home.

Someone said to me once, when you say “home,” I never know where you mean. The truth is, I don’t know either. Home is wherever I miss most at the moment. It is wherever I care most about. I made my peace with the idea that I will never feel fully at home anywhere. The upside of this: there are many places I think of as home.

The only way I can make sense of home is when I think about it not as a place, but as a process. Home is a silent dance of the fireflies in my backyard on a June night. Home is lilacs in the end of may and peonies in June. Home is saying hello to st least five people on the way from the bus stop to the front door. Home is the familiar faces of dogs. Home is a tug of nostalgia.

Home is where one’s roots are, where one’s childhood memories are, but what if one’s roots are in one place and childhood memories in another? If I were to draw the shape of my home, it would cross the oceans and cut the national borders at an awkward angle. Home would be a very big place, or a series of very small places, like an archipelago lost somewhere in the ocean of memory.

This night, I dreamt that the war has started. It was still some distance away, but closing up on me. My phone was inundated with the news: breaking news breaking in the middle of the broadcast with more breaking news. I felt panic. I was trying to decide, whether to run or stay put or rush to get more supplies. My children were getting scared, they begged for entertainment and I snapped at them. I woke up at 4:30 and didn’t want to go back to sleep. I was laying in the very quiet, dark night of a small Canadian town, in the warmth of my bed, in the enormity of winter, in the steady rhythm of my son’s feathery breaths and thought, how heartbreaking, I am one of those lucky few who can escape from bad dreams into reality.

And I felt that I understood, for the first time, why the ancients, the ones who were fortunate enough to survive the famine and be left unscarred by the wars, had such urge to make a bloody sacrifice upon bloody sacrifice to appease fickle gods and beg them not to take the good fortune away.

I met new people today. Meeting new people, truly meeting them, is always a miracle. Sometimes I feel that the things I do have only one true purpose – meeting people. I have few close friends, but an ever-growing multitude of people in my life, all of whom I love with various degrees of ferocity. There is always place for more.

I haven’t read many books since the emotional earthquake of Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me. This may be the longest and driest book hangover I’ve ever had and it may finally be over. Today I started A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar. I am only on page 30 or so, but I have the strangest feeling. I feel like this book touches the very core of my being. Every page or so, I stop and gasp for breath. Every little passage resonates with my own experience: a family trip to the consulate for visas, father’s love for his adult daughter, the daughter’s own experience of parenthood – everything is like a mirror held to my own life. I feel pulled in, but also genuinely scared to contindue reading. I’m afraid that whatever happens in this book, will somehow be personal for me. I suspect that it will open up the wounds that had not been healed, but had crusted over a long time ago.

A few months ago, my therapist, who is Jewish, recommended me a book about Holocaust that had had a huge impact on her. I feel that maybe the book I am reading now is similar. I don’t know what it would do to me.

The things that brought me comfort this week:

A long message from my old friend Natalya about the absurdity of the war

A poem Arguments for Peace by Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymcuk. It starts with:

“How could there be a war in this city with cobblestone streets, glowing stars in the windows, festive dogs in felt deer antlers?”

The way this poem perfectly overlaps Natalya’s photos of Christmas festivities and charity fairs on the fourth winter of war.

The gratitude upon realising that I am not the only survivor.

Every time someone sent a heart in reply to a message.

I decided I will only be sending hearts from now on. In times like these, there can’t be too many hearts.

An email from Naomi after we had coffee together “I’ve added that book to my library list.” My library waitlist kin.

A man sitting next to me in a crowded coffee shop, typing away some quotes from Hannah Arendt.

I don’t even have to know you to be comforted by you.

Today, for the first time in all the years, I didn’t go back to work on the very first day after Christmas break. I stayed home with kids, just the three of us, doing nothing worth remembering. It was wonderful. Little by little, I am trying to teach myself what is important and what only seems to be. My kids know it better than I do.

Like last year, I start January with a stack of books that I randomly picked in the local library. This year’s selection includes I who never knew men, Le mage de Kremlin, Hamnet and Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives that I probably won’t read after all.

Also, I am feeling an insatiable desire to draw. For now, I am just copying the photos of different animals from my kids Anthology of nature, but who knows, maybe one day I’ll have an idea of my own. The watercolour pencils I bought on a whim (or intuition?) in December, bring me so much pure and inexplicable joy that I just secretly splurged on two more pencil sets of different brands. I have no artistic ambition besides giving my soul any kind of nourishment it asks for.

January 1 is the year’s equivalent of 5am in the morning. The same dazed stillness and the same feeling of expansive possibility that may or may not be an illusion.

I’ve filled the day with modest firsts. The first page of a new journal, the first walk. The first bird I spotted this year is brown creeper. I’ve decided to keep a journal and a tally of the birds I meet and I have no idea if any of these micro-resolutions will stick, but I find comfort in these small things.

I almost prefer November to October, because now we’ve done the active dying part and can be at peace with death.

A few remaining leaves will detach from their branches and fall quietly, some time in the dark that now takes a bigger part of the day.

After the heartbreak of October comes the slumber. It’s the giving up of something you can no longer hold on to. It is dispossession and liberation.

It is a good time to let go of the expectations, just before the countdown, before an arbitrary frontier between old and new year jerks us back to the wishing/hoping mode.

Rest well.