tiny miracles

Jane says: I am living in a miracle.

It should be too early on a Sunday morning for miracles, that slightly bleached-out time on an empty stomach, before the smell of freshly percolating coffee gets inside the day. The wind is chasing stray leaves in under the door, skittering like mice across the tiles. I am dreaming of butter melting on golden slices of toast.

We have been talking about many things, about big and small challenges, and battles to wage. But somehow, talking about these things with Jane, you find yourself building strategies rather than bemoaning defeat. There are white horses and pennants and other days to fight, and there is such a thing as the army of good.

She takes students up to get tested, she tells us. Whenever there is a need, or a reason to be concerned. She's been doing it for fourteen years.

She's never had a student test positive. She beams as she tells us this.

A miracle, she says.

In the tree today there were tiny birds, so small I stopped and involuntarily put my hand up, as if to measure them. They can land on the layer of algae on the pond surface outside my window without creating a ripple, as though walking on water. When they perch on a thin curved stalk of the pampas grass that sprouts from the bank, it justs dips a little lower into the pond.

They are too small to exist; perfectly, impossibly tiny.

When I see them I believe in miracles. I believe in people like Jane.