A flag was once there, where the Peace Arch now stands. No one remembers it anymore, but once there was a flag--a more temporal stake in the land. That flag was rolled up one day when a ship came into harbor, and tucked into a trenchcoat and taken to sea. The flag had once been white, but was washed out with sandwater and sun, and tattered at the edges.
Hannah's lover said this flag was the same one he had inherited from his grandfather. Hannah's lover was a captain of a fishing boat. He was older, with white hair, and portly, and she had met him at a coffee shop, where they had both been reading books. She put her book down first. "I don't bring a book, or read it, if I want to meet someone," she told me. Hannah was beautiful and I couldn't imagine any book a barrier for attracting attention. Her hair was the color of honey and her eyes were warm brown. She was from Lebanon and she had a lilting accent. Her first husband she'd married when she was very young. It had been arranged and he brought her to the United States, where he beat her. One day, she escaped, with only a car and her life, and she started over.
Her doctor discovered a lump in her breast only one year later, when Hannah was 30 years old. Hannah was slim with curvaceous hips and full breasts and when they told her they could try to remove a small piece, she told them to cut it off entirely. She didn't want to die. She felt the captain would find her repulsive when she told him, but it hadn't mattered at all. He made her laugh, even in her shame, which she knew she shouldn't feel, but felt anyway. Her family felt it was a sign from God, Allah, that she should have stayed with her husband. Hannah told me, in whispered tones, that it was during this time, in recovery from the surgery, that an owl had flown out of a tree and landed on her arm, staying for awhile, and then took off again. "THAT was my sign" she said. She had noticed the owl when she was outside crying, and thought perhaps it was injured because it was so still, watching her, never blinking. Another time, Hannah saw a prism of lights, swirling above her head. "Were you on drugs?" I asked. She said no. She had a therapist, of her own accord, and wondered herself if it was a sign she was crazy, but her therapist was a mystic, and believed some of Hannah's visions were from another realm. With the visions, she gained hope and an insight into beauty.
Hannah is real, and I met her at a language center for foreign students learning English, and yet I see her now in Blaine, with her sea captain, in a long-sleeved cotton shirt that clings to her body, standing on the deck with a cup of coffee and I can hear her throaty laugh.
The flag was carried back and forth during the bootlegging days of Blaine. It is now folded into a book which rests at the bottom of a cedar chest on the captain's boat. It was just the beginning for Hannah, and she hadn't known when she fell into the arms of this stranger, what the white flag had stood for. She only knew she was restored to herself and had entered a new phase of life which drew animals and birds to her, and a new range of color.
A few miles away an owl watched from its perch in a tall black tree, as a man rolled out a sleeping bag and built a small fire in the forest of Birch Bay, pine needles crackling on the logs.
Closer to the border, a house was being built, 6 stories underground.
Rising from the earth, a Native American woman, clutching nightshade, in a traditional wedding gown; a mother pouring tortilla soup from a thermos for her children; a white man in a blue suit carrying a briefcase with important and illegal documents; and 3 men from 3 generations of border patrol.
I am married to the third man.
It's not a traditional marriage, because I am only a spirit of freedom, and I have more than one lover, more than one husband, and more than one wife, but some embrace me more than the others do. I have my favorites, and I like the way the third man kisses me...best.
I am not the only spirit of freedom. We are too many to count. We're the same, but we each have a territory and we are shaped in part by our experiences with the people in our vicinity.
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