Dedicated to Flor
“If you don’t hear from me….”
The cryptic message from the other side of the world was met with shocked silence.
They had recently become friends, connected through cyber space, initially by virtue of the loss of their spouses. Thus, they shared their mutual woes, shattered lives, love, and loss.
But there was laughter too.
They called themselves soul-sisters, twins, though of different mothers. They had never met. They lived worlds apart. They were in fact not related except by deep, abiding care and concern for each other.
She lived in typhoon alley, the most active place on earth for tropical cyclones.
An unusual stretch of violent weather that had wiped out crops and livestock, leaving thousands homeless, had already prompted thirteen dreaded announcements from the Typhoon Warning Center alerting residents to flee their homes.
Though satellite systems and sensors, radar and atmospheric models had long since replaced acetate and grease pencils, it was the absence of the twittering sounds of the birds that first warned her of the fierce wind of a super typhoon on the way.
Sustained winds of 115 miles per hour always struck fear in her heart, the potentially catastrophic impact sure to include uprooted trees, downed power lines, crushed wooden houses, the torrential rains triggering landslides, widespread flooding, and loss of life.
She’d done what she could she’d said.
“I brought the flowers in. No time, not ripe anyway, to harvest the pomelo on the fruit-laden trees. All will go to waste.”
It was then as her voice trailed off with her last six words that fear of near-cyclone force struck the heart of her friend thousands of miles away.
“If you don’t hear from me….”
Hours dragged on, seeming like days, until there was a most welcome sound, accompanied by a message.
Pleasant lower tones accompanied by cheerful higher overtones, like tinkling bells, was this sound, not a portend of the terror such as warning brings, but rather a melody of warmth, a harbinger of hope.
And there was a brief message.
“The storm has passed. And this morning, as I awoke, I heard a sound in the gentle breeze. And I thought as I listened that it was as if you were singing to me.”
It was the sound of the wind chimes.