A Break From Life

There’s something about being outside that works like magic in me. On a bad day it makes all the difference, even having just ten minutes out in the fresh air. The sounds, the smells, the crispness and realness of it all revive the innermost parts of me. I love trees—the way leaves are like mini mirrors, catching and reflecting the sun, sometimes rustling wildly and sometimes completely still. I love the breeze, how it blows under and lifts up my hair and gets into my head in a way that nothing else can. I can feel the cleanness of a chilly breeze going through me, like it’s washing out my insides. I love that trees make you look UP.

I need to be made to look up sometimes, at that huge sky, breathe deeply and slow down. And the sky—it manages to be gloriously beautiful to me, even though I see it every day. It never seems to repeat the same shade of blue, and there’s the time of day, early evening, when there are layers and layers of different colours on the horizon, perfectly blended into one another. I don’t even know what those colours are! I used to be so disappointed when I tried to paint a sunset, and failed miserably—my levels of colours just looked like bars of solid colours painted horizontally on the page. And the clouds have their own personality. Sometimes they’re wispy and faded, blending in with the blue. Sometimes they’re bold tufts that look like they’re poking through the canopy of sky, with distinct outlines in bright gold, or purple (I know they’re called ‘silver linings’, but I hear the phrase too often for it to mean anything). I love walking through the trees, gazing up at the tops and the sky beyond, and hearing the sounds of life. They’re subtle sounds, and if you don’t focus you don’t notice them. There’s distant buzzing of busy insects, and rustling of leaves, and faint scuffling of small animals, and the different birds all trying to put in a word. Sometimes I try to shut my eyes while I’m walking, so I can just hear the sounds without getting distracted by the rest, but normally I end up tripping, or nearly doing so. So I keep my eyes open.

But honestly, I need to be outside to feel alive, to feel my soul and God. My busy life does a pretty good job of distracting me from what’s inside me and what God is telling me, and I can’t think clearly until I get outside and pause life. Out there, it feels like everything is put back into perspective in my head. This is me—here I am, looking up at the expanse that I can so directly relate to God through his signature of everything beautiful that He made and that I love!

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.

From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands;

you put everything under his feet…

Psalm 8

Branghis

Being my last April Fool’s at MCS, I decided I needed to do something worth remembering. We have had some fun pranks in the past, mostly as duels between the boys and girls. In elementary we used to set our alarms for some suitable time in the middle of the night; something like 2:00 am, and get up to tip-toe all over the hostel, smearing greasy things on door handles, pouring soapy mixtures on the floors, covering toilet seats with saran wrap, writing lame messages on mirrors with soap, and locking bathroom doors from the outside so the unfortunate desperate kid had to climb over the top to open it. What was really interesting, at least once that I remember, was when we girls were sneaking around the floor setting traps and all that, and we ran into a small group of boys who had also set their alarms to get up and booby trap the place. I believe a few seconds of awkwardness ensued before we retreated back to bed. Unfortunately I got a container of ladybugs thrown into my face, and had to try to collect them before they spread all over our room. We were still finding dead ladybugs in random corners and cracks for several weeks afterwards.

Over the years, and as I’ve moved through the departments, the pranking has gotten more advanced and exciting. The last day of term has always been a popular pranking time, where the Deo cans come out and normal rules are conveniently forgotten for a short while. One year the boys put a goat’s head in the girls’ bathroom sink. Another time we switched all of the junior high girls’ beds with the boys’, and once we also turned the junior high boys’ lounge into a bathroom, carrying an unused toilet seat that had been sitting outside the maintenance shed for who knows how long up three flights of stairs. The fall back prank for the boys when they can’t think of anything creative has always been to simply trash the girls’ hallway, emptying their compost onto our floor and tossing in a Deo bomb. The key to the good pranks is to get the enemy’s house parent on your side, because then you can go all out without getting busted.

Well, a few weeks ago we came up with a new idea. We decided to buy a chicken and let it loose on the guys’ floor in the night. At first it didn’t seem very doable, seeing as we had no clue how we would acquire a chicken. But last night I had a moment of inspiration and determination to make it happen, so we asked the Senior High Boys’ houseparent if he would be willing to drive to the (very) nearby mini village to buy us a chicken. We did tell him what it was for. Thankfully, he consented, and a couple hours later we had a tied up live chicken in a plastic bag. I paid 160 rupees for it—the Canadian equivalent of about $ 1.60. I was disillusioned about the smelliness involved with housing a chicken. These creatures reek! But I was determined to make the prank happen, so I suppressed the urge to gag and throw the chicken outside. My roommate and I ended up being the ones most passionate about seeing the prank through, so we set our alarm for 6:00 the next morning and left the chicken in a makeshift bucket coop. In the morning when my alarm went, I didn’t remember at first why I was getting up so early. Then I remembered, and groaned aloud, wondering whether it wasn’t downright stupid to do what we were going to. But it was too late to back out. My roommate and I went to gather our chicken, and I honestly nearly puked from the smell. I do not advise smelling or handling a cooped-up chicken at 6:00 without breakfast in one’s stomach. The actual act of putting the chicken on the floor was easy, and we weren’t seen by anyone.

We were expecting some annoyed and maybe angry guys to confront us that day, but it turned out that they loved the chicken. I was confused to hear the guys talking about “Branghis” during lunch, until I realised it was the chicken. My little brother, Stephen, and his friend Calvin had adopted it and named it. They were keeping it in a storage room, and Google told them all they needed to know about keeping a chicken as a pet. Stephen asked me to print a legal page stating his adoption and ownership of Branghis. I thought it was a cute ending to the prank, and was relieved to be rid of the chicken. Little did I know, the boys had a better come-back for our (what I had previously thought to be) ‘brilliant’ prank.

Later that evening Branghis was returned to us…with a severed head. I admit that I reacted a little bit hysterically…I had just received some unpleasant news about a break-in at our house, which was still on my mind, so when I ran out onto the floor to lock our hallway door from the oncoming guys, I was completely surprised to see Brenghis fluttering madly through the door I’d just opened, and I nearly stepped on him, as he spun around in circles, spraying blood everywhere. I turned around quickly and ran back to our house mum’s flat, screaming (and yes—crying). It angered me that the boys could have betrayed their “pet” so quickly and that I had NOT had the final word in the pranking world. They, of course, had never meant to prolong the death of the bird but apparntly didn’t know how to properly behead it, and had to finish the job on a second try.

I recovered shortly, and was left with feeling very embarrassed. The cherry on top to this little episode is that I have been planning on making a meal for Stephen and his two friends for some time, and I finally decided to do it tonight. Stephen, who had bought the chicken off of me after adopting it, felt terribly about wasting a bird that had been through so much, so he begged me to cook it. We googled how to pluck and skin a chicken–something I had never done before. And tonight we will be eating deep-fried Brenghis.