The Lady from the Clouds

Everything in the kitchen was sticky from the summer heat. The heavy aromas of a finished lunch, the leftovers on the table, our silence... Not even the most delicious bites of food could lessen the quiet shock of what had just unfolded.

"So, we are packing up?" I asked, as if checking the truth of what I had heard just moments before one more time.

The expected answer disappeared into a child’s simple need: "Mom, I’m thirsty!"

As he drank his water and shuffled away with that clumsy, endearing toddler waddle to keep playing, it hit me: it was right here, in this house, that he took his very first steps. Tears began to fall on their own. How was it possible that we wouldn't be shaping our future in this small treasure chest of our beginnings, our struggles, and our joys? And where would we go next? I do not like the unknown.

I cleared everything from the table, lined the dishes up like soldiers into the dishwasher, and went to pull out the suitcases. Five years of life packed into a few boxes. And once again, starting all over from scratch. When you are a child, no one warns you that life isn't just an equation. And that the domain, sometimes, cannot be precisely defined.

I felt his hands on my shoulders. Right there, where the invisible strap of a heavy backpack rests—the kind you just have to carry sometimes.

"We can’t keep counting every single month whether we have enough," he said softly. "This place isn't ours anyway, we're renting. Over there, they are offering us more, something better. Marija, every now and then, you float away to the clouds. Right now, you need to come down. I don't have a job here. Over there, they want me. Over there, they need someone exactly like me..."

"And what about me? My job?"

"We certainly can't live off of that anyway!"

A cold shower. Nothing cuts quite like the truth thrown straight to your face. My calling, my classroom—reduced to a statistical error of survival.

Yet, that calling didn’t begin with a degree or a contract. It began much earlier, in my own childhood. My mother, a university professor, always knew how to add in wisdom as she passed by, while I dreamed of being a singer:

"You see... Never expect more from others than from yourself. Never wait for someone else to pay. Always secure your own path and have enough for what is necessary. You dance to music, you swing, you sing, and you wipe away tears. Music feeds your heart and soul. But a degree feeds your stomach."

When you take a piece of chalk at three years old and press it against a large green chalkboard on a wall, you inhale your very first step of falling in love. I was raised in a house where you could always smell the scent of paper and books, alongside a thousand aromas of the most delicious meals, woven together with music and hugs. The path of growth naturally imposed itself. I became a small, mobile, creative kitchen of life, bursting with pictures, words, and musical notes. I carried it all with me—not in a bag, but tucked safely deep inside my heart.

And then came that summer, back in 1984.

I spent that summer vacation with my grandmother and grandfather in my hometown. The most beautiful green yard, filled with the scent of young canopies of apple, pear, and cherry trees. Every summer, my grandmother would tidy up a tiny house beneath the old cherry tree, with its wide trunk, just for me. That was the place where anyone who needed me could find me.

"Who are you?" I asked a blonde boy with a quiet gaze.

He shrugged his shoulders and wiped his nose with the sleeve of his shirt. After a few moments of anticipation, I went back to "my business."

"What are you doing?" he asked, looking at the notebook in my lap.

"Sit down, we can write together!"

He shook his head. I shrugged my shoulders and continued. After a few moments, he left.

For two or three days, he came by silently. He was slightly older than me. I found out that he didn't like school. Although surprised, I didn't ask many questions. A deeply curious, precocious nine-year-old girl learned early to wait for the petals of the world to open on their own. The world had labeled this boy early on as different and slow. He could barely read and couldn't grasp basic arithmetic operations. I had never seen his textbooks—I don't think he even had them.

But my mind, driven by an instinct I couldn't yet name, forced me to learn everything he needed to know in a matter of days, just so I could give him what belonged to him. We didn't manage to translate the cold language of numbers, but we found a warm shelter where he could finally feel capable. We spun a calculator and wrote numbers we didn't understand, watching what happened in that world of relationships. We were tailoring our own world—pure, childish, and human. It was a simple need to build a bridge where someone else saw an abyss. That very summer, I decided that I would become a teacher.

On paper, it says that I officially entered the classroom twenty-five years ago, stepping into a world of structured duty. But nobody can write love onto a legal document. My husband talks about statistics and numbers, completely unaware that my love story with this profession has been burning for forty years. I discovered that mathematics is merely the architecture of space, while human emotion is the true architecture of the soul. And more than that—I became a gardener of human spirits. I studied the uncompromising precision of numbers the least; instead, I lived in the wild, deep, and uncontainable currents of literature and philosophy. Expanses and proximities.

For a very long time, I wasn't even aware of the true weight of this gift. And then, the children revealed the secret to me. They looked beyond the professor and found the human underneath.

I am a teacher, but above all, a person who loves play. The kind of play that fully reveals the world, through which we grow, fall, and lift each other up again. Our table is a vast, open field that the children and I sow with our shared desire never to be hungry—hungry for understanding, hungry for knowledge, and hungry for true, heartfelt participation. In every shared game, we harvest the courage to face tomorrow, proving that the classroom is not a place of confinement, but a landscape of endless possibility.

My deepest, quietest dream was never about professional titles, fame, or the empty applause of institutional success. My dream is an environment, my colorful treasure chest—a vibrant, lively home filled with laughter and unconditional acceptance. The universe has its own equations, a different kind of supreme mathematics. Today, I am a rich soul, deeply blessed with every new classroom. They are also a part of my family, a part of me. The collective soul of hundreds of young human beings whom I must respect, guide, and accompany. My task is to teach them how to stand firmly on their own feet, how to protect their boundaries, and how to think before the final bell rings. I write the poems we recite, we craft the stories that lead them to question the world, and I rejoice in their growth as if they were the very soul of my soul.

Today, we are witnessing a global flight from true learning. Modern parents and teachers demand education instantly, in the blink of an eye, through a three-second video with a shallow hook and a loud microphone. I am getting the children used to this too, helping them navigate the digital noise. They want the reward without the process, the cake without the baking. In the midst of this chaos, I have returned to my classroom as a rebel. Here, away from the glitz of virtual validation, I share and I receive. My classroom is the sweetest, most delicious piece of cake, an extraordinary recipe that grows larger and richer every single day. There are thousands of educational methodologies and recipes in the world, but if they lack that hidden, secret ingredient woven from all the spices of raw, uncompromised love, they will fail. Without that spice, we simply will not survive the winter of our own superficiality.

For too long, my own mind ran like a tireless, mechanical engine that never knew how to turn off. My heart carried a deep, silent, and heavy ocean of everyone else's burdens, absorbing the toxicity, the misunderstanding, and the fatigue of the environment. My body was the quiet, unspoken hero that endured the silent war between my racing, loud thoughts and strong emotions. It bent under the immense weight of carrying the world on its shoulders; it accumulated the physical armor of daily stress from endless packing, suitcases, and counting pennies. But it stood up every single morning, even when my bones ached, refusing to let down the children who are hungry for my strength. Movement. Support. Sustenance.

And then came the spring of 2025.

The class had ended. It was one of those sessions followed by that heavy, leaden exhaustion that presses into your bones. I thought all the students had already left the classroom. But...

“Teacher, do you plan to stay at this school until you retire?”

It was a question I didn't expect. Not at that moment, and certainly not from that specific boy. With a sharp flick of his head, he tossed a curl away from his forehead, as if he clearly, transparently wanted not only to hear, but also to see my answer.

“Ah... I don't know,” I said honestly. “Sometimes I think there is no more beautiful place for something like that. And sometimes... I really don't know. I'm not thinking about it just yet.”

With his class, even though our parting was slowly approaching, I had often struggled. No matter how hard I tried, a lingering doubt hovered over the entire year that we hadn't truly managed to connect on the same wavelength. They knew that in other classrooms, I ended every session with a joyful, collective goodbye ritual. But his class? They had heard it, they knew it, yet they stubbornly refused to participate. They had spent the whole year resisting it.

“I'm glad you're asking me that,” I added, while gathering papers, pencils, and geometric models from the teacher's desk. “You know yourself that there are moments when we touch the peak of the pyramid in class. But there are also those moments when we slide down the edge. Sometimes I really wonder if it's worth it... doing this much, this way?”

He lowered his backpack and stepped closer to help. Moving quickly, we gathered everything and placed it on the shelves. He smiled, picked up his backpack, and headed toward the door.

Then, he stopped. He turned around, looked me straight in the eyes, and deliberately used the very words his classmates had rejected all year. It was his way of breaking the resistance, of honoring the forty-year war I had been fighting.

“Cheers, teacher. And Bon Appétit!” he said, and stepped out of the room.

I smiled, quietly. I was still looking toward the empty doorway when he suddenly reappeared. He peeked back in, anchoring his gaze to mine, and added just one word:

“It is worth it.”

And then he was gone. For nearly a year, I had waited for that sign. That echo of my own devotion.

Every afternoon, when the final bell echoes through the long corridors and the noise of the day fades into silence, I give the children a hug—a real, unconditional hug that doesn't demand compliance or perfection. And together, in a loud chorus, we call out: "Cheers!" and then, "Bon Appétit!"

We do it because we know we sat together at the richest table in the world—a magnificent, family-like banquet of knowledge, community, and unyielding support. We have fed each other’s souls. We have grown together, and we will keep growing long after the school year ends.

My husband was right that day in our sticky kitchen—I had to come down from the clouds. My life has been a relentless map of moving, from the forced evacuations of war to the conscious choices of survival. Just when I find my footing, the suitcases come out again. But this spring, a lady from the clouds has finally stepped onto the solid, warm earth. Not to give up, but to grow deep, unyielding roots exactly where she is needed most. From this life-giving feast, there is absolutely no turning back.

Because that is exactly how it has to be.

To that: "Cheers! And Bon Appétit!"