"As a Turkish immigrant who has lost many objects and people, I was reminded, reading Kathryn Schulz's essay about her two seasons of physical, political, and personal loss, of Tying the Devil, a whimsy many Turks practice. Whenever my mother mislaid a brooch of her keys, and had resigned herself to failure after days of sporadic searching in drawers and in the dark recesses of furniture cushions, she would take a piece of string about twenty centimeters long, walk around the house tying knots in it, and recite, "Devil, I got you now. Let go of what you took from me, and I will let you go." She was tying knots around the Devil's penis to hold him hostage before he could permanently claim the lost object. After the keys reappeared, each knot had to be undone to free his penis, and my mother often spent days struggling with the string to release the Devil. I am old now, and my fingers have trouble undoing the knots in strings; these days, I allow what been lost to fill what Schultz calls the Valley of Lost Things. If mastering the Boy Scout Book of Knots would bring back any of my dead for a sip of wine and conversation by the sea, I would gladly do it. The Devil, though, is only after my wallet and my keys."
Yesho,
Asheville, N.C.