I'm a girl. This journal is almost 10 years old, when I started it, I called it Almost 21. Before that, I had a journal called Soap on a domain that no longer exists. Some things have changed since then, some things haven't. I always wanted to be a writer. I live out that dream here.
We drove home listening to cyclone warnings on the radio. On our side of the island, there was no trace of so-called Cyclone Amie who had monstrously taken over the northern islands, flooding villages, uprooting trees and blowing roofs off houses and schools.
"Yay, yay!" We cried, my sister-in-law and I. Although on my part the cries were half hearted. I was older now, and realised the consequences of the cyclone for other people - for those who were feared dead, and those who had abandoned their homes and were seeking shelter in caves.
I had not seen a cyclone for almost ten years. Back then, cyclones were exciting things for us kids. We would sit up all night with our windows open, listening to the wind screaming outside. The power would go off for weeks on end and we would have dinner by candlelight, and do our homework underneath kerosine lamps and pretend that we lived in the villages. Then my dad discovered rechargable torches and things become a little less exciting.
And when the cyclone had moved on, my dad would take us sightseeing so we could survey the aftermath: houses and rivers flooded with churning muddy water as people paddled around their backyards in dinghies. Our house never suffered serious damage, but every cyclone I would wish that our back yard would flood so that I too could paddle around it in a little rubber boat. The only thing that did flood was my grandmother's garden of yams, which she would reconstruct before you even noticed that it had ever been damaged.
The Last Cyclone
My dad had a handsome rooster he had bought from a farm to keep as a pet. He called it Cocky and tried unsuccessfully to train it. My grandmother (my dad's mother), The Evil Wench, hated the rooster because she thought chickens and roosters were only good for one thing: eating.
My Black Hen
When I was four, my granddad (my mother's father) gave me a pet hen. She was little, with black feathers and I called her Blackie. I adored this hen - I would feed her first thing before going to kindergarten and find her and chase her around the yard first thing after I got back. On the weekends, I would clean her hen house and give her a bath with the garden hose (which I don't think she liked very much).
One day, on returning from school, I searched for Blackie but she was nowhere to be found. After searching for serveral hours I ran to my mum, crying, and told her what had happened. My mother told me, while cleaning a small featherless hen over the kitchen sink, that Blackie had run away. But even without her feathers, I recognised her. Sobbing, I screamed something about never eating meat again and ran to my room where I planned to stay forever, but had to come out the next morning.
It turned out that while I had been at school, the old wench had told the gardener to catch the hen and kill her, without my parents knowing. She then threw the corpse at my mother and demanded that it be cooked for dinner (Blackie was so young, there was no meat on her anyway, my mother tells me, but my grandmother just couldn't help herself).
Yellow Gumboots and a Raincoat
Anyway, so my dad had a rooster. When she realised she couldn't eat this rooster, my grandmother brought home a hen, which she said was for eggs, but really it was out of spite.
My dad kept his rooster in a large cage type enclosure that he had had made when he had brought a snake home once (which escaped the next day - my dad thought that he could train all sorts of creatures, luckily this did not last long). My grandmother put her hen in there, too, hoping the two would get cosy and she would have some chickens to murder. Now the enclosure didn't have a roof, so it was covered by two pieces of corrugated iron with a few concrete blocks on top to stop them from getting blown away.
Along came the cyclone, blowing away the corrugated iron with a whisper of her wind, proving the blocks redundant, and blowing the enclosure over sending the birds running into the garden bush seeking shelter. So the old wench realises the birds are out, she ventures out and recovers only the hen and locks her inside the warm store room, leaving the rooster to seek his own shelter among the nasty wind and rain.
Now for us kids, this is great. "We must save the rooster!" We yell excitedly to each other, making a mission of it. Donning yellow gumboots and pink raincoats, we step into the cyclone, working our way against the wind which pushes us into trees and drains, to the rooster huddled under a bush, who gratefully jumps into our arms without complaining (a first). We carry him with much difficulty, as the wind is determined to push us over completely, to safety (the gardener's toilet under the stairs). Pleased with the completion of our mission, we celebrate and tell the tale of our great deed for months after the cyclone has been forgotten.
Things you thought Couldn't Happen
While we cleaned mostly fallen leaves off our lawn the day after, my mother scrubbed away at the floors of her father's house which had been covered in mud. My grandfather lived in a village half an hour away from the city, and the cyclone had not been so kind to his house as it had been to ours. The floor of the entire house had been flooded and dried into a giant cake of mud. So, my mother, her sisters and my grandfather scrubbed.
She came home that night and stood speechless in the middle of the lounge, a blank look in her eyes. Then suddenly, she burst into tears and fell into my fathers arms where she cried loudly for hours. I listened under the covers of my bed, too afraid to leave my room.
My grandfather was dead. Someone had found him lying in the toilet, face down. He was alive then - he must have slipped and fallen while cleaning, they said. As quickly as she could my mother had him carried to her car where he lay in the back seat while she, alone, drove him to the hospital through the dark starless night.
When she got there, he had passed.
To this day I do not know how she did it. She possesses strength and courage that I would not have, and probably will never have, and I admire her more than she knows.
Hear my Prayer
While everyone in the car screams "yay yay we're going to the cyclone!" I sit quietly in my tight seat by the window, and wonder about the twenty people feared drowned.
I hope they are alive. I hope that the people sheltering in caves will be okay. I hope that nobody will lose their loved ones, and that nobody will have to watch their father die.