During mornings in California while home visiting my parents at Christmas, I sat on the love seat in the living room listening to the sounds of my mother cooking for her two men. My father read the morning paper, while I wrote letters to those I met on my journey, Letizia in Italy, Alan in Kenya, and Sarah in Australia. I heard my mother scrape the brown gravy from the cast-iron skillet, the click of china, the clunk of the pan of biscuits against the table top, the smell of bacon, her call to breakfast.

I gave a three-hour slide show and the whole family came, even my arthritis-crippled aunt. I had to repeat it the next day for my uncle. My parents watched both times, spellbound by the Greek countryside and gushing questions about the ruins of the ancient civilization.

During my days there, mostly I stared out the front window at a green field where a flock of snow-white cranes gawked through alfalfa like animated Christmas toys, long question-mark necks. Now and then one spread its wings to loft like a white kite buffeted about by a breeze above the deep-green field. The far edge of the alfalfa disappeared into the fog shrouding farm houses and barns.

My son came down from San Francisco. I was pleased to have him with me for the holidays, but still felt the loneliness of my daughter’s absence, she a continent away in New York.

Christmas Eve, the four of us got into the old two-seat pickup for the short drive to my brother’s new home. I remember sitting in the cramped backseat with pies surrounding me, chocolate meringue, coconut cream, wafts of pumpkin pie rising from one in my lap, another on the seat beside me, another yet on the floorboard, and stuffing in a pot ready for the turkey.

The most lasting image of my father was when we passed out presents, the kids shouting and laughing through piles of wrapping paper. He sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair, three presents in his lap like gift-wrapped tumors. When asked why he didn’t open them, he said, “It’s not Christmas yet.” And it wasn’t. It was Christmas Eve. But for him, Christmas joy had been overridden by some sad memory. Did he still worry about what had happened between us years ago? I'm not sure he even remembered it. More likely he simply longed for the days when his parents were alive, and we all had Christmas their home.

One evening after returning to Colorado, I read Beryl Markham’s book of barnstorming around Africa in the '20s and '30s, West with the Night. My pulse quickened at her description of being attacked and almost killed by a lion when she was a child. The unnaturally-domesticated lion roamed a neighbor’s land and was tame, had never made a kill. But one day, he spotted lighthearted Beryl singing and running through a hot-dirt field and had a change of heart. After knocking Beryl to the ground, the black-mained lion, affectionately named Paddy, stood over her roaring, paws buried in her back. Her description of the experience contains some of the most moving lines I’ve ever read:

The sound of Paddy’s roar in my ears will only be duplicated, I think, when the doors of hell slip their wobbly hinges, one day, and give voice and authenticity to the whole panorama of Dante’s poetic nightmares. It was an immense roar that encompassed the world and dissolved me in it.[1]  

Her neighbor, who'd witnessed the attack, charged the lion and the lion charged the neighbor to protect his fresh kill, thus releasing Beryl and allowing her to escape. Her last words were of sympathy toward the lion: “He was a good lion ... and I cannot begrudge him his moment,” she wrote.[2]  Upon reading these words, I put the book down and quite unaccountably cried.

Then I went to buy a ticket to a movie I was to see later that evening. Spielberg’s Schildler’s List had just been released. When I returned home with ticket in hand, I was still sad, a magnificent hurt in my chest. I continued having flashes of the scene from Beryl Markham’s book, the image of Beryl facedown on the ground with the lion standing over her, she his fresh kill, the neighbor rushing to her rescue. The scene kept coming to me with waves of unbearable anguish. And I wondered, Why should I relate so strongly to an image of Beryl Markham, on the threshold of being eaten by a lion?

Suddenly, the year was again 1961. I was face down on the bed in my parents home, my father in the bedroom loading the deer rifle. My hands opening and closing on the cold stiff sheets. I was the fallen child, he the lion roaring over his fresh kill. Again I heard my mother’s footsteps as she charged into the room.

Wave upon wave of unbearable grief coursed through me like the waves that night on the beach at Matala, Sophocles’ ebb and flow of human misery. I had finally found the feelings, the grief, I had not felt thirty-two years before. They were hidden beneath the image of a girl, undoubtedly the suppressed feminine part of myself who appeared as my mysterious imaginary companion when I was eight years old the night our home burned. She was the only safe place I knew to hide my feelings.