wind

the wind is gusting at fifty miles today. fitting for the strange grief that's gusting around me. i spent the morning with two slices of peanut butter toast and the newspaper, haunted by article after article of the shootings in virginia. i'm tightened by that same strange rock-like hurt that came after columbine -- when i sat with my mother, my hair dripping wet, watching the tv as bombsquads surrounded the school i passed a hundred thousand times on my way to our public library. we waited and waited for my little brother and sister to come home, for the lockdown to end. and for weeks i always felt like crying. for weeks i looked at my ashen faced sister and her trembling hands and wondered if sitting in the cultural hall at church tying quilts for those kids who were locked in the choir room could really help. it's the same thing now: it seems wrong to talk about strawberries or the weather or doing the laundry because everything is different. because people are gone. people that mattered to other people. whole chains of friendship and family whipped apart by an inexplicable violence that newscasters spend mornings and evenings trying to explain.

shout

i took henry to see the mountains today. we didn't have to go far: i just opened the curtain in my aunt's spare bedroom where we've been staying and pressed my nose against the window. mountains are bigger than i remember. they push up and up and up, all brown and crumbly and staked with trees. with such a clear big gasp of sky hanging between the peaks in the east and their sisters across the valley. i want to take them home with me. i want to wrestle them into my diaper bag next to the burp rags and the tinkly rattles and drag them across the threshold of my little apartment. i want them to jump like a real live pop-up, cut outs of greatness filling my living room. i want the wash of cool mountain air to stream around my ankles. i want henry to know how it feels to stand at the top of something so tall and shout shout shout.