Number Twenty-seven

     She headed east on her lonely travel, swiping to clear away hordes of buzzing flies doing their thing in the patch of sunshine before the shade of the largest tree around.
     “I’ll go twenty-seven steps up,” she whispered to herself. “Only twenty-seven then I can stop and rest.”
     At the appropriate number of steps, no more, no less, a large cool boulder caught her sight. A rock with a seat exactly her height for sitting upon to rest her tired weight.
     “This is good,” she said. “I am meant to be here. From here I can see the sheer rock wall ahead. But, from here I can also still hear the warning calls of the cock below.”
     Birds chirping near her told of all the excitement ahead but the foreboding call of the cocks told her there was danger and she was old.
     “What else has made it this far,” she wondered.
     Tiny little heads of yellow and purple flowers, no more than a couple of inches above the ground proved that this was an unforgiving place and no extra energy to grow tall and magnificent should ever be expended in this high thin air.
     “Go on,” chirped the noisy chorus of birds.
     “No, you need to rest and go easy,” the small flowers shouted as they desperately clung to their rocks.
     The old lonely woman focused her tired eyes on the leaves of various shapes and tones of green covering the verdant hills leading up to the sheer rock cliff to the East for which she was headed.
     It can be climbed and she knew it.  But the stunted flowers reminded her that there is a price to pay for reaching such heights, a price to pay for going East all alone through the thinning cold air.
      She is weary but drawn to the other side and takes another twenty-seven steps East.


(Written on the hillside of Chefchaouen, Morocco March 4, 2020.)