Wrinkles and Time

When I was a little girl one of my favorite places in the world was my grandparents house. I loved everything about it; the smell when you walked in the door, the cream carpet in the living room, the brick fireplace upstairs and the stone fireplace downstairs. I loved that we always had tea when we went there, and I loved that the guest room had red carpet-- red carpet! I loved laying on my grandparent's bed and looking at all the trinkets and bits of jewelry and perfume on my grandmothers vanity, and I loved the cherry tree in the backyard.
But there was also the bits of Africa. I perhaps did not love them as much as I was fascinated by them. The wrinkled face of an African man, dressed in a worn hat and coat. The picture made entirely out of butterfly wings of an African woman carrying her child. The artistric wooden carvings of African men and women.
The pieces of Africa were not particularly unusual things to find in the house of two South African immigrants, but they brushed against a string in me that had never been played, and I've been addicted to the hum it makes when you strike it ever since.
This, along with a few other things, is why I am packing my suitcases and flying across the Atlantic to go somewhere I have never been, to see people I have never met; it's because it is in me already.