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morning, while I stand in the kitchen making coffee, I see the man who had sounded the alarm the day before loading his glass into the recycling containers in the street below. Or at least, it really looks like the man from the day before. Nibbling at my croissant, my heart is warmed, and I am moved to thank him again. Opening the top half of our Dutch door, I call out to him in bad French, “Je vivre!” An attempt at a little joke, calling out “I’m alive!” The man squints at me and stands up from his glass bottles. “Hallo! JE VIVRE!!!!!” I call again, thinking he hasn’t heard me. He nods vaguely, looking befuddled. I yell it again when he still doesn’t laugh. “Oui, d’accord…” he says uncertainly before he gets in his Peugeot and drives away. Standing in the doorway, I suddenly realize that it is not, in fact, the man from the day before. I laugh, and the laughter grows and radiates until there are tears in my eyes and I spend several minutes shaking with deep belly laughs in the kitchen. I cannot imagine what he and the other villagers he will undoubtedly gossip to must think of the American shouting from her front door that she’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive!

My mother’s house on the Haut de Fée has not had a house number since she and my aunt bought it in ruins years ago and restored it. So the mailman delivers my mail to the neighbors, knowing that in this small village, it will eventually make its way to me. But I want a mailbox. I want an address. So one weekend I go to the town hall to talk to the mayor. The town hall is only open from 9 to 10 A.M. on Saturdays. I wait in line behind farmers, and then it is my turn, and in broken French, I introduce myself and ask the mayor for a house number on the Haut de Fée. “We have no number,” I say. “La poste n’arrive pas.” He nods. He explains that nobody has lived in the little house for many decades, that it has never been assigned an address. He spreads out a blue parcel map of the village on his desk and points out that we are the only residence on that road besides the cemetery. He puts on his glasses and studies the map closely. Even numbers are on the left, odd numbers on the right. The cemetery is on the left. We are on the right, odd numbered. “O.K.,” he says finally, straightening and removing his glasses. Deal. We can have a house number. I smile, triumphant with my accomplishment. “Merci,” I say. “So, what number is our house?” He sticks his thumb in the air. “Numéro un.” Number one. We shake on it.

Walking back up the faerie hill to the house that overlooks the village and the valley beyond, I feel strangely powerful in the realization that I can just walk into the mayor’s office and change the map. Who knew you could change the map? I feel the triumph of my small victories.

After the winter, I return to California. The letters are there.

Be a writer, they say.

Mieke Eerkens was born in Los Angeles, California to Dutch parents and has spent her life divided between the United States and The Netherlands. She has a B.A. in English-Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and an M.A. in English Literature from Leiden University in The Netherlands. For the last seven years, she lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she worked in Communications and Marketing for the nonprofit sector. She is currently delighted to be working on an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Iowa.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Beneath the Rim

Our boats are four in number. Three are built of oak, stanch and firm (with) water-tight cabin…. These will buoy the boats should the waves roll them over in rough water. The fourth is made of pine…built for fast rowing…. We take with us rations deemed sufficient to last for ten months.

—John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons

WHAT A DIFFERENCE 140 YEARS MAKES, I THINK AS we pump up our inflatable Hypalon boats and fill our coolers at Lee’s Ferry on the eve of a 297-mile journey down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. John Wesley Powell’s rations on his 1869 expedition included