It’s amazing the difference a year can make. Yesterday marked the turn of the New Year on the Islamic calendar. It is now A.H. 1431, one thousand four hundred and thirty one years after the Prophet Muhammed and friends made their flight (or migration, depending on how you interpret events) from Medina. As the story goes, they spent the night in a cave on a hillside and while they were sleeping a spider spun a huge web across the opening. In the morning when the enemy came looking for them they passed by the cave because the web was intact and they assumed no one was inside. In Arabic, this is called Al-Hijra, hence the A.H. demarcation of the year. This marks the official beginning of the Islamic era.

Last year we were kept up into the night by the sound of celebration. Shop windows had been decorated for weeks, greeting cards were in windows and parties were being held all over town. Women leaned off of balconies and trilled shrilly into the darkness and we enjoyed the novelty of an unexpected December celebration.
Last night we stood shivering in the darkness, under the same watchful eye of Orion. The crash of Mediterranean waves on the beach a hundred yards away was replaced by the laughing and shouting of kids playing tag by moonlight. I was conscious of the Muslim holiday even as we’d stood in the church, surrounded by new friends swimming in the layers of harmony that are Handel’s Messiah. As the Hallelujah chorus ebbed and flowed and swelled around us I wished it to the ends of the universe and the east coast of Africa where our friends lay awake, listening to the high voices of Bedouin women. For just a moment, the chorus filled every corner of the world and there was nothing else in existence but the voices of children singing praises to God. A moment not to be missed, an experience to savor and tuck away for remembrance on other Christmases on other continents.

The children ran, pink cheeked in every direction, playing hard with their friends. “It will be a miracle if we get our four back out of this crowd,” I quipped to my new friend, Joanne. Her teeth were almost chattering as she stood in her pink shirt sleeves with a scarf wrapped around her neck and sparkly blue eyes. She was holding two boxes we’d had shipped to her house. “We opened, this one, I hope you don’t mind! We had some coming from this company too and so I wanted to make sure you got the right box! I opened it and I just had to laugh. I called David down and asked him who he thought the box was for… he laughed too and said, ‘Mrs. Miller!’” She handed me the box filled with books: Camping Mexico, a Berlitz Spanish Phrase Book, and I, Roberta Menchu; the story of a Guatemalan woman’s political persecution I want to read as we travel. The other book held coloring books about Mexico, anthologies of Central American Mythology and art prints from Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo that will add to our road schooling as we go next month. I thanked her for the boxes, laughed at the thought of David’s immediate recognition of my purchase patterns and set about the task of extricating the four children I brought from the fifty or so scattered through the inky black.

It was a quiet ride home. Ezra slept… “I’m gonna be out right cold Mom!” he said as we climbed in the van. The rest of us looked out the window at passing Christmas lights and rested. I tried not to think about the packing and sorting required for departure for Canada next week, to say nothing of Central America in a month. We are glad to be here for Christmas. Glad to be “home” even though we’re not, really. Glad to be celebrating with new friends and some extended family as well. Glad to be watching ice freeze of the Atlantic bay outside our cottage window instead of taking the kids swimming in the Mediterranean on warm December afternoons. Any sort of New Year makes me wonder where the road is taking us, the Islamic New Year, it seems, is no different. There’s no telling where next Christmas will find us, but for this year, we’re perfectly happy to be exactly where we’re at.