"To what hail do you hark, Ellery?"

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, dear Annie Dillard writes of the haunt of migration resonating through a fishbowl:

Inside the house, my single goldfish, Ellery Channing (who but Dillard names a goldfish Ellery Channing?! I'm delighted.), whips around and around the sides of his bowl. Can he feel a glassy vibration, a ripple out of the north that urges him to swim for deeper, warmer waters? Saint-Exupery says that when flocks of wild geese migrate high over a barnyard, the cocks and even the dim, fatted chickens fling themselves a foot or so into the air and flap for the south. Eskimo sled dogs feed all summer on famished salmon flung to them from creeks. I have often wondered if those dogs feel a wistful downhill drift in the fall, or an upstream yank, an urge to leap ladders, in the spring. To what hail do you hark, Ellery? - what sunny bottom under chill waters, what Chinese emperor's petaled pond? Even the spiders are restless under this wind, roving about alert-eyed over their fluff in every corner" (p. 50).

I feel that same yearning in my soul - for migration, or adventure? My ancestors must have been nomadic, like the Indians roaming bare-foot the plains. I feel restless in the spring and hungry for life. Who in my soul moves me to migration? I feel the urge of the sad, obese hens - longing to be released from gravity and fly.

But it's not a place I want to fly to - I'm not fool enough to think that travel will satiate my soul-pangs (though my excitement for Athens increases ten fold daily) - I want to fly to freedom. For myself - for these women who've changed their street-names 10 million times until they forget their identities. I'll dream names for them all: Desiree, Jaya, Ruby, Stella, and Hope. Just those five for tonight. Be free!