This morning, we woke up to a stillness like no other.
Meteorologists predicted snow yesterday, even issued a Winter Storm Warning, but I didn’t believe them. Often, when we get that kind of hype over an approaching storm system with the possibility of snowfall, they turn out to be wrong.
This time, they were not.
I had trouble going to sleep last night. Our bedroom has skylights, and when we turned out the light, as soon as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized it didn’t seem dark at all. The light outside seemed more like a full-moon glow, only slightly rosy. Around one AM, I got up and walked through the house, looking out every window, and sure enough, a little snow was falling. Not much. That would be it, I thought, but still, I couldn’t sleep. I lay there anticipating, like a child.
So we woke up to about three inches of snow, and now it’s nine-thirty, and the sun is out, and it’s beautiful, but melting fast. I went out to take these few shots an hour ago, and I could already hear the dripping, dripping.
But here you are, a memento of a Southern storm. No ice. Just that beautiful silence and a white topping over everything.
Deck
Nandina
Bare trumpet vine
Holly
No hummingbirds here!
Rosemary and empty pot
Three inches deep
A little weight of snow
My small stones are faltering, but maybe this post will count.
The best intentions often . . . Well, you know about that.
On January 10, I committed to a Mindful Writing Challenge, posted that day, and immediately fell behind. But I had one more scene of the novel to re-visit, I’m revising the synopsis, I’m reading manuscripts for a workshop coming up in a little more than a week, I—
All these excuses, this busyness. All the more reason to take a moment and focus on something small or ordinary or extraordinary, like a sleeping cat on Day Two:
Old cat sleeping behind my head on the back of the couch, mewing in his sleep like a kitten, moving his mouth like he’s smacking his lips. What does he dream?
Oliver, awake
And for Day Three, another haiku:
After today’s storms,
blue sky and wind-driven clouds.
Radiant sunset.
Variation, winter sunset
Thanks to Kaspa and Fiona at Writing Our Way Home for this challenge. I shall try to do better!
But other adjectives stick in my head this morning. Unspeakable. Horrific. Tragic. Unbelievable.
None of them are sufficient. There are no words for what happened to twenty young children in Newtown, Connecticut yesterday. I keep thinking about the parents who had already shopped for Santa or who were engaged with their children in other holiday traditions. I think about the mom or dad who dropped a child off at school yesterday morning. An ordinary morning. Maybe homework had gone undone the night before. Maybe they were running late. Maybe there was a last-minute hug before the child got out of the car. Or maybe there wasn’t.
In light of the tragedy, I can’t write fiction today. I can’t write about smiling snowmen or bright lights or children mesmerized by a Christmas tree. If I had to choose one image, I would write about the one at the lower right, that ghostly image of a child’s backyard play set lost in a sea of blue-white, snowy light. The emptiness of it. The cold.
This morning, all those children are missing from their parents’, their siblings’, their grandparents’, their friends’ lives. That kind of emptiness is beyond my imagination. I’ve lost people I loved–a marriage gone to hell, my parents and grandparents, other relatives, friends–but I have been blessed to see my children grow to adulthood and now my grandchildren, too, three of them in their teens. I simply can’t imagine waking up every day with the kind of hole in a life that the death of a child creates.
I witnessed my grandmother’s grief when my mother, her only child, died. My grandmother lived nine years after that, to a stunning old age–almost 98–and she never got over that loss. My mother was 65, and I felt her life had been cut short.
But these little lives, in such a senseless act of violence?
Two things
I have made it a point to stay away from politics on this blog, but I have to say two things today:
We must do something to keep automatic assault weapons out of the hands of those who should not have them. What ordinary citizen needs a gun that fires off multiple rounds in seconds? I don’t believe this is what the founding fathers had in mind when they proposed “the right to bear arms.”
We must do something about how we care for the mentally ill in our society. The only way I can conceive of someone committing such a horrific act is to believe that person was seriously ill. Who else could act without conscience, concoct such a plan, and carry it out? We are failing this segment of our population. We throw drugs at them and expect the drugs to work the cure. Granted, we don’t know much about this “shooter” yet. Surely there must have been signs. Maybe those around him were doing all they could to help him, but somebody missed something.
They say a tragedy like this brings out the best in us as a community, as a nation. I want to believe that’s true, but unless we change things, this event too will be forgotten by all except those most closely affected. We’ll move on, and nothing will be different. And there will be a next time.
That’s all I have to say this morning. I still want to write that story, but not today.
That empty play set is too haunting. Heartbreaking.
Please keep those parents and the whole community of Newtown in your hearts. Hold your own children close. And tell me here how you cope with a tragedy of this scope. What are you telling your children?What are you telling yourself?
Gerry Wilson 