When we were kids, my Dad would show us the cranes flying home each evening in perfect formation. Whenever he saw them from the terrace of our home, he would point them out to my brother and I, and talk about their perfect V or W formations with great admiration. And if we were lucky, we’d get to see them change formation in mid-flight. It was quite amazing to watch. There were a few ponds and water bodies in the area, so this was a fairly common sight each evening, but we never failed to stop our game of cricket or football, just to watch the cranes flying overhead. It usually signalled an end to our playtime, as dusk was falling, and it was time to go indoors.
My Dad had a knack of quietly pointing out to us interesting sights that a kid might otherwise overlook, like the hills in the distance on a really clear day, the golden sunsets from our terrace, the bright orange skies at twilight (he’d say it was a sign there’d be Mackeral at the fish market the next day), the birds, the trees, the flowers in our garden.. there’s so much we learnt from him. He was a great role-model, he took pleasure in the little things, and instilled in us a respect and appreciation for Nature.
Ever since my Dad passed away 7 months ago, I’ve been watching and waiting for a sign - something to tell me that he’s ok, and that he can still see us and be with us in Spirit. My little 2 year old daughter often talks to “Papa” (my Dad) when she passes his photograph in our living room. And I always tell her, “Papa can hear you, he’s your guardian angel now”.
One day she opened the front door by herself to sit on our front doorstep and watch the birds and people passing by. I was in the kitchen and didn’t know she had stepped outside. Suddenly I heard her cry, she had slipped and fallen down the two steps. I ran to her and picked her up, checked for injuries, and found to my relief that she was unharmed. I carried her indoors and told her, “See baby, Jesus saved you.”. She replied and corrected me, “Papa saved you” (she still uses “you” instead of “me” to refer to herself).
One of our evening rituals is to put out breadcrumbs for our little feathered friends who visit our front yard every day - the bulbuls, tits, sparrows, wood pigeons, babblers, and sometimes a mischievous chipmunk or two. My daughter will often see a crow or pigeon flying overhead on their way to roost, and she’d say, “Bye crow, go home safely”. As we were looking up at the evening sky a few weeks ago, I mentioned to her how, as a child, Papa and I used to watch the cranes flying home, and how we’d never seen any cranes here since we’d moved to the hills a year ago (not surprising, since we don’t have any large water bodies in the surrounding area). She had never seen a crane, so while she listened patiently to my childhood story, she probably had no idea what I was talking about.
A few days later, we went outside late one evening after dark (it must have been around 8 p.m.), to try out a “light-up” toy that my husband had bought her. It worked like a catapult and had to be launched high into the air, and then as it came down like a parachute, it’s twinkling lights lit up and twirled around like helicopter blades. It was quite exciting to watch, and as we stood in the dark sending up the little helicopter over and over again, we noticed lightning over the hills in the distance, and suddenly a huge barn owl flew low overhead. As we oo’d and aa’d over these sights, I suddenly looked up to see a flock of cranes flying overhead in the dark, in perfect formation! And just as they flew over us, they changed formation in mid-flight. It was so beautiful to see, and so unexpected, that I was astonished and mentioned to my husband how only days earlier I had been talking about the cranes I used to watch with my Dad as a child.
Later that night, I researched crane behaviour online, and found that they rarely, if ever, fly at night. In many cultures and spiritual traditions, cranes are believed to be messengers between heaven and earth, connecting the spiritual and physical worlds. Since that day, I have been keeping a watch for cranes at dusk or anytime I go out later in the night, but I’ve never seen any. Whether they were just migrating cranes, or cranes flying to a distant home on a route they knew well, the fact that they were flying in pitch darkness and at an unlikely hour, makes me wonder if this was the sign I had been waiting for. Nevertheless, it made my smile and made my heart a little lighter that night. And I felt my Dad smiling back at me.
