It's Not Over Till It's Over

But I sure hope you're doing better than I am now

At the end, perhaps all that will be left is gratitude.

For the sustaining bowl of food. For the life-giving air entering one’s lungs. For the beautiful surprise of half an hour’s sleep at the end of a sleepless night.

For the gift of courage conferred by the knowledge that other people care about you. 🇺🇦

Good, kind people all over the world are very, very worried now. You’re not alone—and I know this because I myself have never been so scared and worried in my lifetime.

Will I remember how to sleep?

I’m only realizing now how much I’ve taken for granted—and how we can’t take anything for granted. So many of the things we thought could only happen in dystopian fiction have suddenly become everyday facts.

We can’t just close our eyes and pretend it’s not happening. But we can’t allow what’s happening to drain us of hope and joy.

Where do we find the strength and resilience to make the most of what we have to give? How do we find the optimism needed to keep going?

Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash

The Struggle That Undergirds the Grace

What a slow way to eat, the butterfly
is given by Nature, sipping nectar
one tiny blue flower at a time. Though
a Monarch in name, she’s made to scavenge
like the poorest of the poor, a morsel
here, a morsel there. A flutter of ink-
splattered orange wings. We don’t want to see
the struggle that undergirds the grace: the
ballerina’s sweat, or her ruined feet
hidden by tights and toe-shoes. She knows her
career will be as brief as it was hard
to achieve. Pollinated, the tiny
blue flowers are sated. The butterfly
flits away, hoping to live one more day.

“The Struggle That Undergirds the Grace.”  Copyright © 2021 Barbara Quick.
recorded by Garrison Keillor for The Writer's Almanac

Scribbles

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

My new era: Write in a way that conserves the pages that are left in my notebook.

How many beautiful notebooks have I filled in my lifetime so far? Wisps of dreams and poems and fears and resolutions that I scribble on the pages while I sip my cup of tea. The warmth of the tea like a kiss I can swallow, a life-force in a cup that also warms the hand that holds it while the other hand wields the pen.

It’s not unlike the way in which a pianist or fiddler uses the left and the right hand independently to send music into the empty air.

But my words only make sounds in my head until later, if ever, when they’re read out loud.

Words are the piece of yarn I tug to unravel the tightly knit mysteries of this self I’ve constructed since that day I was pulled from my mother’s body and she dozed in her twilight sleep (as was the way then for white middle-class mothers).

But my mother—my ditzy and much beloved mother—always did what the doctors said, even toward the end of her life, when what they said assured her a miserable death.

Family lore has it that she was so happy when I was born, because I didn’t have a dent in my head. Forceps weren’t needed to extract me, even though she was too drugged to push—because I came into this world presenting feet first.

Knowing myself now, and knowing my ways, I wonder if I’d hesitated and turned around just before heading out the door, stressing that I’d forgotten something I might need.

And somehow, despite my breach birth, I avoided getting the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck—and was still able to receive my nourishment and oxygen through the conduit connecting us.

Peeking inside, the obstetrician saw my two little feet with their crooked middle toes, and gathered them up in his hand and eased me out into my brand-new life.

My father, with his steady hand, would have been adept at cutting the cord. But I doubt he was even allowed in the delivery room—because that was the way then.

A nurse cleaned me up, wrapped me in a warmed receiving blanket, and placed me in one of my parents’ arms while I squirmed and blinked in the bright light and unaccustomed air.

I swear I can hear my Nana or my Papa tenderly say, “A maideleh! It’s a beautiful little girl, Edith!”

And my mother exulted because I didn’t have dents in my head. And no one put me to her breast, because the doctor or someone else had told her that her nipples were inverted—and she didn’t even try to feed me with her body, once I was out in the world.

Because that was the way then for middle-class white women in the 1950s.

They gave me a bottle right away and I missed out on the colostrum my Mommy might have given me, the gift her body had prepared. The gift that remained unwrapped and ungiven, because she didn’t even know it was there.

Photo by Wald Creations on Unsplash