I had forgotten completely this
in the longing for winter—this winter now just past, this winter that wasn’t. Thirty degrees today and sixty tomorrow: I had wished for just one solid week of winter. I worked my favorite puzzle on the coffee table again, the one with the picture covered in snow, the one that feeds my longing for grey skies and the need to wear coats against the cold and the audible silence of a snowfall.
in the weight of the school year—and the interminable demands for lesson plans at the ready and papers graded, in the faces of students who need me. We lost ourselves in Oedipus Rex and lined note-cards, in research and the citing of sources, the dangers of plagiarism. The weekdays are relentless in their fullness; and in January, morning comes in the dark—a practice that defies all kindness.
in travel to Shanghai—a twelve-hour time change, coming and going. My mother says it costs you 24-hours for every time zone you cross, but I didn’t do the math. Who knows how long it takes to recover from such monumental shifts? The clock arbitrates our days, but what if we refuse to submit to it? We left Shanghai at six p.m. on Sunday and arrived three hours earlier—three p.m, on Sunday—in Chicago. When in the world were we?
in a new kitchen—and oh, I am so grateful. The cabinets are clean, the storage ample. I can’t believe it’s mine. But there again are the days of dishevelment, the appliances and pantry stashed in boxes on the living room floor. We picked our way through them to find the cereal; I earned a serious bruise from accidental interaction with the rice cooker. To say the process has been unsettling would be nothing short of true, the gratitude notwithstanding.
But none of this made me forget. It was something else entirely.
It was that day at the end of January, that Saturday so like any other, when the news came through the phone line that my student had been killed. A freak accident. Who would have thought? In the sliver of a second, he was pulled from this life to the next and all of the rest of us are still standing at the void, peering into the open space that he had filled: at school, an empty desk, an idle locker; at home, an empty bed, a mother’s aching arms.
I lack the language for such appalling loss. I had only just begun to know him. We all needed more time. He was such a beautiful boy.
God lost His Son, too.
I was home on Good Friday, a day off from school, a day to grade papers, to navigate the new kitchen, to negotiate again with God this recent rending. And at the kitchen window, I saw them: the newborn leaves on the maple tree, carried along by the wind. Pulled by invisible agency along with all the other newborn leaves around them, all the other trees who had waited out the winter, who had sustained the months of deadness for this—this glorious movement, unmetered. I had forgotten until Friday how leaves in the wind can look so much like plants underwater. I had forgotten
how beautiful it is.
Not too many days after Blake died, Rachel left a gift in my mailbox. It was a little something lovely, something nice for me to wear. It was to remind me, she said, that there remains some beauty in the world.
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. -John Donne, 1572-1631
