The winds are stirring again this morning.

            I heard them coming before I opened my eyes.  I lay waiting.  The sunlight washed across my eyelids illuminating the transparent maze of roads I knew the winds had taken to get to me.  They’d broken loose as the sun rose over Phalombe and raced across the plain, winding playfully around maize stalks as though waltzing with golden voluptuous women - then pulling them to the ground in a fervor, they released their captives, sending showers of pollen into the air, the aftermath of a brief love.  I saw them pour on, sparing nothing in their path, leaving footprints of red-clay dust clouds obscuring the land, the huts, still asleep before dawn.  Only the women returning from the hills with their head-loads of wood could feel the insistence of these hot-season winds wrapping around their hips.

            And now the winds are here, calling me from the acacia rustling outside the window.  They don’t wait for my reply, just slide through the slats, brushing aside the curtain.  Naked winds dancing around in this tiny room pressing up against me, stroking my body through the sheets then fleeing as I turn to respond.  I shudder from this fever withdrawing from me, my eyes are growing hotter and the roads are burning, leaving me alone with these winds pursuing me; every day now I’m waiting for the rains to release me.

            But when will they come, I ask the boy, Kunjerika.  And Kunjerika tells me, “Tomorrow, Ma-dam, tomorrow, I know they will come - don’t worry Ma-dam, and when they come you will remember what this world looked like the very first day it was born; the grass will grow as quickly as children, the papayas will drop off the trees just as many as the raindrops, and when you walk the path to Mulunguzi the jacarandas will spill their red, purple, white blossoms on your head.”

and I thought...yes, Kunjerika, I will remember.  I will remember.

•••

            It was a brilliant day, a blinding day, when we arrived.  The plane circled Lilongwe airport several times before landing, an oversized African vulture waiting to swoop in for its prey.  I looked out the window at the National Geographic Special we were about to enter and saw lots of tiny black faces following our movements from the lookout deck on the building below.  I found out later that this pilgrimage happened almost every day; adults and children alike came to find out what the metal bird had to bring them that day - a promise or a burden.  We approached each other that day in mutual awe, and disbelief.

            As I stepped off onto the runway the air closed in on me, heavy, sweet; the heat filtering in my nostrils brought with it the smell of many flowers, overripe fruit, sweat - dark, moist, perpetual sweat.  I drank of the heavy sweetness, the heat, as I swallowed and walked on towards the cool refuge of the concrete building ahead.

            Lucy and Mr. Nkwela met us after customs.  She was a big woman, from the Home Economics Department at Chancellor College, and he was a “driver.”  They had a white Peugeot station wagon with cabbages in the back.  Lucy apologized - the cabbages were cheaper in Lilongwe.  She couldn’t come this far north very often, so she was taking back as many as she could.  We didn’t care, we’d finally made it.  Our bags were thrown in with the cabbages as we settled into the burning leather seats for the last leg of our journey.

            I remember that ride so vividly still - my mother, sister, and I stretched out in our exhaustion, no longer shackled to our ten-ton bags.  We’d walked like inmates for days, dragging our “worldly” possessions along the ground, tripping as they wound around our legs.  I’d begun to dread every move we made.  The distance from the hotel to the taxi stand to the check-in line at the airport seemed interminable, unbearable.  In my delirium I couldn’t even imagine why we thought we needed all of it - the clothes, the shoes, sheets, and towels, and pots, and hair dryer, and coffee pot.  It was staggering.  I just wanted to get there.  And now we were here, our escape accomplished.  We were floating along, in a car, with a breeze washing over our aches and everything new streaming in the windows - no fear, no resistance, just silvery hills and dust, and red earth churning along with huts and women and children with no clothes on and colors of wraps around every woman and the one road in the whole country that was leading us to our home.  For hours we rode in this mesmerizing movie scene of childish wonder, letting our senses absorb anything this new land had to offer. 

            In the evening I saw the first signs of “civilization:”  A row of street lights cutting through the blackness at the outskirts of the town of Zomba.  They were such perfect, uniform spheres of light compared to the tiny fires we’d seen flashing up along the roadside on our way.  As we glided into this runway of fluorescent beacons, in our white chariot, I thought it somehow strange that this was the beginning of our life in Africa.