The paper crane co-operative

was formed by myself and my three best grade 5 friends in an old weatherboard schoolhouse in Brisbane. We had all just read the story of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. If you haven't heard it, Sadako was a girl from Hiroshima. She was two when the bomb hit, and she died of leukemia at 12, from the radiation. A friend visited her in hospital and folded her a single golden crane in honour of a Japanese legend: if you fold one thousand paper cranes, you get a wish. Sadako folded 644 before she died. There's a statue of her now, in Hiroshima, and paper cranes have become symbolic of peace.


Which is kind of ironic, because the paper crane co-operative - formed in her honour - was anything but peaceful. It started with competitions: who can fold the biggest, who can fold the smallest, who can fold the most between morning tea and lunch, who can find the prettiest paper, who gets guardianship over the bulging burgeoning shopping bags - tears were shed, and after a particularly vicious exchange, 67 paper cranes were ceremonially burned in my fireplace one winter weekend. Peace was made the following Monday, but paper cranes were never mentioned again.


I still think of her, Sadako, sometimes, like when I had to google "how to fold a paper crane" once because, somehow, I had forgotten. Or just dumb questions like, if she could've started a facebook group and a thousand members joined, and each of them folded a crane on her behalf, would she have gotten that wish?