Ceporah called up the hillside to me. The two of us have been cabin neighbours for more than a decade; this past September, we went out on a berry-picking expedition about twenty-five kilometres from Iqaluit. I was obsessed with picking the ruby-red lingonberries bejewelling the land behind our cabins, while she had decided to comb the beach below us.
Ceporah held up a bright-orange oblong buoy—the kind we use as fenders for our boats. “Uaaik! Nanitsiasimasatit!” I called back down to her. .
We love to watch for useful debris along the shores—driftwood, rope, anything possibly reusable. “Akukittuminngaaniit!” She called back up. (The word for Greenland is the Inuktitut term referring to Greenlandic traditional fashion and is literally translated as “This is from the land of the people who wear short apron hems.
”) Ceporah scrambled up the hill to show me just how significant her find was. “Johannes Aqqalinnguaq” was scrawled across the sturdy plastic, along with a six-digit cellphone number preceded by a plus sign. With a name and phone number like that, without a doubt, this object had travelled from Greenland all the way to our cabin area.
After some quick messaging and phone calls amongst friends, we found out that the owner of the buoy was in Upernavik, in northwestern Greenland, which is also my ningaaq Edvard’s hometown. My ningaaq, my cousin’s husband, had only just been to our cabin this past summer, and at the time, he had remarked over and ove.
