A story about dying is always a familiar story, right? The ultimate change challenge? “They are dying!” I said, like this was a surprise or needed pointing out. The daffodils, poster girls for Spring, now looked like used latex gloves* on stubbornly green stems. My mother gave us the bunch early in self-isolation, soon after New York City had gone into lockdown. She cut them from the ruthless crop in her yard, as she did every spring when they briefly appeared. When my husband dropped off ice cream and Lysol spray (pandemic essentials), she sent them home for us--my husband, our 22 month old and our 4 year old-- to bring the outside in. The daffodils made me cry because they work. They are the symbol of arrival and transience, and they live and die boldly and quickly. They were also, very simply, from my mother. At that moment, my belly was ribboned with anxiety that she and my father, too, were facing imminent COVID transience. I imagined what so many are experiencing: final separation from us in an overwhelmed and handicapped hospital system. The fear for my parents, the longing to cling, flared up: is it ridiculous cling to summer’s bounty when autumn has already dusted the trees of their leaves? For how long can you save that last blueberry before it shrivels? But despite my contrafactual wish otherwise, die the daffodils did. I did not want to look at a dying thing on my table but I equally did not want to throw them out. Problem. Turn it into Art & Make Your Meaning So I dried them. I turned them upside down, bound their stems with a rubber band, and hung them from a random nail on the wall with a garbage twisty-tie. Their vibrant yellow faded, their vibrant green went dormant inside an unremarkable brown. But they did not rot, and they became something else beautiful. Something I could keep. I know, snooze, a story about daffodils drying. But stay with me here. Days later, my Continue Reading …
reflective writing
Writing Change and Loss
September 11th, a day of tremendous change and loss for so many in NYC and their families. Every year, the old is new again. If you're applying to college now, you were barely born then; or maybe you newly knew how to say plane, tower, fall, fire, help. You didn't know how to deconstruct it, or what it really meant. This terrible catastrophe was emblazoned in American Consciousness-- you were there even if you weren't THERE. That's because all of America was there, vicariously. Everyone knew 9/11 marked a seismic shift in how we thought about our vulnerability, how vulnerable we really are. Memory Challenge Memory is funny that way. Remember when the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up? You were definitely not alive then if you're just applying to college now. I was, though. In my mind, I'm again watching the disaster at blast off happen on TV, the huge TV they wheeled in to our elementary school classroom. On our walls were block-letter ideas of the future-- how we could write more clearly, add more exactly, have dreams, penmanship, and punctuation. Everyone took the same freaked out breath at once, and the sky streaked with grey. A decade and a half later, bodies fleeing and jumping from the sky. God, that third grade teacher, Christie-- (was she?) floating back to earth, detached from ship and smoke. No more report cards. I don't know why I imagined her landing in a pile of old math worksheets and guinea pig pellets, in the yard of some public school somewhere, some school inevitably just like mine, kids pausing their ball games and pulling each others' bright plastic barrettes to go check out the damage. We are still checking out the damage. I figured, with my kid-logic, that her astronaut suit- though burnt-- would provide the necessary extra padding so that she didn't smash onto the concrete, but landed gently. Oh, to be on the earth again, oh that the tallest things fall. After a Big Continue Reading …