One day she came home for the winter holiday to find her mother had acquired passports and tickets for a boat and that was that. In that time when you left it was forever and they knew it, so one of the things they took with them was a little jar of earth. Like a miracle the jar never emptied even over decades; whoever goes back to visit brings back a little more for her so that when someone else is buried she can, when everyone else throws canadian dirt on the coffin, carefully sprinkle some home like one last blanket on a sleeping child. I always say they didn’t cross borders so much as be crossed and double crossed by them, but she has found a way to tame them, and so the border between life and death, the socialist people’s republic and the future, Bosnia and Croatia lies peaceable and waiting in an old glass jar in her hall cupboard.

Shhh.