Eleven Thousand Origami Cranes

My mother's seventieth birthday was coming up, and she had always said she wanted to see a thousand paper cranes. So the family decided to fold them.

The plan was a thousand. My nieces got overexcited, my brother recruited his office, and my aunt taught her whole church group. By the end of September we had eleven thousand cranes in boxes in my garage.

We strung them in long rainbow chains from the ceiling of the community hall for her party. When she walked in, she stopped in the doorway with her hand over her mouth, looking up at the ceiling.

She walked under them for a long time, touching them gently. "Who made all these?" she kept asking. We told her: everyone who loves you, and a few hundred people who just heard about you. She's kept a chain of them in every window of her house ever since.