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He showed me plants that grew, and told me of their many uses. Sometimes we waited for a bird to hatch, or a bud to bloom, so that I would understand the nature of things. We took furs and traveled to the cold. We saw snow and the colored lights that sweep across the night skies in the north. There we stayed with a family in a house of earth and ice with a fire always burning at the hearth. And it was there that a baby was born, early, while the father was away hunting. Grandfather helped in the birthing and so did I, for there was no one else. The baby came into my grandfather's hands and I helped pull away the afterbirth. And when I saw the mother, and the baby girl, I finally knew how marred I was. I told Grandfather what I had come to understand, and that I wanted to leave. And we did, as soon as the baby's father returned. Grandfather held me while I wept, every day, for a time. “Careen," he said, “you are a healer of men. That is why I found you." And he began my training. By then I was about twelve.
When I was grown and we finally set about to find my own house, I said it must have a courtyard like his with the same fruit trees and flowering shrubs. We found it, and spent days moving plants from his courtyard to mine. We rearranged his, and there was plenty for both places and more to spare. Next to my house was a grove of acacia and a house for Ilona, my pet cheetah, although she often stayed by me, lying on the sun-warmed brick among the delphinium, jasmine, hibiscus, or under an olive or fig tree. I hired servants, Gilda and Saud, but it was I who kept the changing room, which Grandfather had helped me furnish. After he died, my grandfather's words often came back to me, “Careen, you never know what treasure may be found in a heap of rubbish_"
Ezra was one of my earliest pupils, he came every week, and he was with me the longest. When a man came for a session he would enter the gate, turn at the second gate