There stood Manela on top of Stone Mountain, her traditional Ethiopian dress blowing in the breeze...

I walked a mile to the top of the world’s largest granite outcropping and there stood Manela, her traditional Ethiopian dress blowing in the breeze, making her look like a celestial being among the throng of Saturday tourists and regulars. She is visiting from Addis Ababa and only speaks Amharic, so her nephew’s family translated. “Does her name mean anything special?” After thinking for a moment, her nephew said, “I have something. It means ‘I have something’.” But when I was struck by the tattoos on her neck and asked what they meant, the answer was either longer than they had time for, or they didn’t quite know themselves. Really, they had already been so generous with their time. “It was just something that was done to her when she was very young,” the nephew said nonchalantly. And Manela’s twelve year-old great-niece, Sara (her American name), guilelessly advised that I could Google it. So I did. And, y'all, it’s nothing short of amazing that, on a mountaintop in the South, I would learn a thing or two about the Coptic crosses tattooed on Manela’s neck (and likely down to her chest) as a symbol of her Christian Orthodox faith.