Archive for category: JOY, popup edition

Easter Visit

Éamon brings his parents Cadbury’s eggs, although their sense of time is snarled now, a jumble of feasts and birthdays and long-gone anniversaries. The couple are sitting up in the double bed in the converted front room, a bit like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, except there’s only one set. They chat away to one another, mainly about old times, two conversations running parallel, yet the couple seem to find solace in one another’s voices, in their own familiar tones and cadences. 

Whenever Éamon comes to visit, the carer makes tea – strong as tar – and Kimberley biscuits are procured from the back of the press.

‘Are ya alright for money, son?’ the old man asks for the third time.

‘I’m grand, Da, don’t be worrying now.’ 

When the moment is ripe for it, when Éamon perceives a rising agitation – the clutching of bedsheets, the complaint of aching hips – he quietly asks the carer to bring in a basin of warm water. 

‘Now, Ma, ladies first.’

He helps her to perch on the edge of the bed, and places the dish on the ground. She smiles as her feet make contact with the sudsy water. 

‘That’s nice, son. Fair play to you.’

Her hands unclench as she wriggles her toes. You’d think she was at the seaside on a sunny day.

Éamon repeats the whole process with Da. A calmness settles upon the room, a sacred silence.

On his way back to the Parish House, Éamon runs through the homily for the Holy Thursday Mass in his head. It will be a tough one, and an easy one.  He’s going to talk about the washing of feet.

I do not Fear Aging, for I Know it is a Gift

I will grow old.

This is not spoken as an inevitable,

But offered as a promise;

That I will grow old,

And that I will love it.

I will grow old,

And I will have wrinkles,

And crow’s feet,

And frown lines and white hair,

And what a wonderful thing,

I’ll say;

What a wonderful thing it is,

To be old.

I will spend my summers under the hot sun,

And I will let it bake wrinkles into my skin,

Like crackling sourdough in my oven.

I will spend my falls walking among the leaves,

And I will listen for the crunch under my boots,

Long after I am hearing through hearing aids.

I will spend my winters with my favourite mug never far,

And I will bake the gingerbread recipe that I never measure,

Because I cherished the memory of the taste over precision.

I will spend my springs dancing in the rain,

And I will turn my face to the sky so that I never forget the clouds,

Even when my eyes have gone and glasses aren’t enough. 

I will grow old,

Because if I die young this poem will be a tragedy,

And I demand a happy ending.

I have lived my youth in agony,

I am older than I ever dreamt of reaching,

And I am only getting older.

What a wonderful thing that is,

I say;

I am only getting older.

A Snapping Turtle in the Road

The road is no place for a snapping turtle. This hard stretch of grey that thunders with the sound of shining creatures beyond her understanding is unnatural to her. But the road is an obstacle between her and where she needs to go to lay her eggs, so journey across it she must.

But she’s come to a stop.

She was almost halfway across, when suddenly, one of its flashing creatures roared past her. She could feel the heat of it sting against her nose, missing her by a step. She tucked her head back into the safety of her shell, trembling, as it roared away.

It’s here that she remains frozen, fearing the appearance of another. She can hear its oncoming roar, fast approaching. She braces for impact, even as she hopes it will see her as uninteresting and leave her unharmed.

The ground beneath her feet trembles. Closer and closer the roaring comes, until just as suddenly as it started, it stops. 

Then, a slam. 

Two legs step into her field of vision, and she recognizes the shape of these legs; long and bare-skinned, ending in two bulky feet. When the animal crouches down, showing her its odd, flat face, it confirms what she’s looking at.

A human. 

Her head surges forward suddenly. Sharp, powerful jaws open wide and snap shut hard enough to make a loud crack. She doesn’t succeed in biting the human, but it still tumbles backwards with a cry of alarm, falling on its hindquarters. Though she can’t reach it, she snaps at it again. A warning; keep away, or she’ll bite.

Undeterred, the human gets up again. A loud screeching suddenly assaults the snapping turtle’s senses, and she shrinks back into her shell once more, fearing another monster. A different sound joins the screeching, more loud calling, and this she recognizes as the cries of the human. It moves out of her field of vision, leaving her alone once again. 

Suddenly, something grabs the back of her shell. Her head darts back out, and she whips her neck back to snap viciously at whatever has caught her, but she can’t reach. 

She sees it only briefly; the human is holding onto the back of her shell. She tries to gouge with her hind claws, but the human’s hands press on her limbs, keeping them immobile. She’s lifted off the road and into the air. She continues to thrash her neck about, hissing furiously. 

The human moves loudly, each footstep jostling her as it carries her across the road. She refuses to be pliant in these strange hands, she won’t let the human do what it will with her without a fight.

It could do anything. It could drop her from this great height. It could crush her beneath a heavy foot. It could kill her in so many ways, and make her into a meal, like she would with a slippery frog. She is powerless against the human, a feeling she is not used to. She keeps trying to bite, keeps trying to claw.

But the human doesn’t do any of those things. Instead, it carries her some distance away from the road. It stops its thunderous walking and lowers her, gently, to the ground.

The ground that meets her feet is soft. It’s soil, loose and sandy, that gives beneath her weight until she sinks into it. The cushioned hands release her. 

She hears the footsteps again, shaking the dirt around her, until they fade away. The human is gone as quickly as it arrived, retreating back to wherever it came from. 

She doesn’t move immediately. Perhaps out of caution, or perhaps out of contemplation. Here she sits in the dry dirt, perfect for egg-laying, and she understands that this happened because the human helped her.

The snapping turtle can’t understand the human’s actions. All she can understand is that a human did not harm her, nor did it try to eat her. It seemingly risked its own life against those road monsters, just so it could bring her to this place of safety, where she could lay her eggs.

She doesn’t understand why. She can’t understand why. 

The snapping turtle has no concept of kindness. She can’t comprehend the tenderness of the human’s act towards her. But as her claws dig into the soft earth, preparing it to receive her eggs, she continues to think about her encounter with the human. 

She’ll think about it for a long time. Her memory is long, it will carry on for many egg-laying seasons. And with every clutch she lays, she will remember the human that made them all possible. The human that braved monsters, and carried her away from them. 

What an incomprehensible animal a human is. To be so large, so powerful, so fierce as to shout at monsters, while at the same time having such gentle hands, to rescue a snapping turtle even though it had nothing to gain from doing so.

How delightfully strange.

A traveller’s litany

I believe we only age in silence, that grains of sand run smooth in darkened rooms. I believe covered heads lie on candy pillows grasped between a cage of teeth. I believe as another year passes, sweet bones slip between the ghost of a stair gate. I believe some eyes curse the moon and its daughters. I believe only strangers know me. I can only fall asleep to the ticking of a clock. I believe the beating of a heart.

What I Didn’t Take Today

I’m trying to find some joy for my poem because both—the poem and I—are aching for it, and everything I might receive it from has declined our plea, albeit politely. I could have peeked into our old album, where smiles lie nestled in time’s stillness, more than willing to spill on me—but today I’m not keen on their generosity. I could have scanned my journal, older than the album itself, which carries a hurriedly torn quarter-of-a-page bearing your hasty-but-pretty, jumbo-font message, calligraphied with an improvised permanent marker:

“[your name] is inside”—

taped to the inside of the front cover, ahead of the scribbles on my first page. It has always brought me a grin when I recall the walls you scaled to slip in before adorning the door with this cello-taped, unabashed announcement—its confident, presumed self-invite.

I could have done any of these, and more, but I wouldn’t want to cling. If there is joy now, it is only in a beatific scream befitting the ache of letting go, of accepting impermanence. Perhaps I’ll go for it, and this poem—it will too, learn to introspect and wait its turn. I know it will come to know, in time, that joy can’t be contained: a scintilla wriggling to break through, even as I breathe buried beneath this flotilla of bulk-laden pain—from behind some brazen wall, a break-in door, or an inconspicuous bend. And maybe then—birds and bees and I—will be busy enough to notice when the poem begins to bustle. And on some long, cold winter night, the album and the quarter-of-a-page may relearn how to rekindle, for this old heart, a new, warm, tear-strung smile; and for the poem, a string of ocean’s pearls.

Small magic

After a typhoon destroyed my father’s brick factory in our hometown, my mother brought back a large box of beads from the town factory. She said she had always liked handicrafts, but when we were younger she never had the time. Now that we were older, with my older sister twelve, me ten, the next sister eight, and my brother six, she could finally return to something she enjoyed. “Don’t worry. We’ll manage to borrow money to rebuild the factory,” she told my father over the phone, who was still in our hometown five hours away. “I’ll handle our living expenses.”

She sat in front of the television every day, stringing bracelets and necklaces as she watched her shows. She taught my sisters and me how to choose beads and match colors, and how to guide thin thread through bead holes so tiny they made you anxious. “Dark blue with light blue looks like sea and sky,” she said, rolling a frosted bead in her fingers. “Add a white one and you have a wave.” We concentrated hard; even my brother wandered over. His little hands grabbed fistfuls of beads, and my mother let him play until he got bored and climbed back onto the sofa to watch Doraemon.

She also brought home bags of plastic petals, stamens, and leaves. She showed us how to glue petals around a stamen, how to wrap green tape around wire to make a stem, and how to attach the leaves in just the right spot. But we complained about the sharp smell of glue and how plastic flowers lacked the scent of real ones. “Use your imagination,” my mother said. “We’re conjuring blossoms.” She told us we were magicians capable of creating beautiful, fragrant flower fairies, though she opened a window and set the fan facing outward for fresh air. 

Handicrafts were not as joyful as she claimed. My older sister grumbled about her homework; my younger sister kept saying she was tired. One by one, they slipped back to their rooms. Only I remained, learning, amid the noise of cartoons, how to “grow” a singing flower in the fastest way. “What a lovely voice,” my mother said. “More melodious than a yellow warbler.”

One evening she carried home a bundle of half-finished clothes. “Flower season is over,” she declared. “Today we sew buttons.” She called it a skill every good girl should know.

We disliked it immediately. “Our summer uniforms don’t even have buttons. The winter ones have zippers,” my older sister said. “The needle keeps poking me,” I added. My younger sister cried outright after pricking her finger.

“Practice a few more times. Be careful. You’ll see, it’s easy,” my mother coaxed us, forcing a small smile. “Think of it this way. You’re letting the clothes bear fruit.”

We shook our heads. Even my brother frowned.

“Sewing buttons,” my mother explained, “is just the foundation. Once you learn it, you can make cloth dolls, knit sweaters, even do physics experiments.”

“This isn’t fun at all!” I burst out. “Handicrafts are your hobby, not ours.”

My younger sister sniffled; my older sister buried herself in her workbook. My brother had long since crawled under the table.

My mother looked at the buttons scattered across the floor and sighed. She pulled a strand of bright yellow thread from the box and, holding it under the light, slowly slid it through the needle’s eye.

“What do these buttons look like to you?” she asked. Before we could answer, she picked up a small round white one. “Doesn’t this look like a tiny robot face? See, the top two holes are eyes and the bottom two are nostrils.”

My younger sister stopped crying, peeking through her fingers.

My mother then picked up a square brown button. “This looks like a dirt block from your video game,” she told my brother. “If we sew it on with green thread, grass will grow right on top.”

My brother peeked over the edge of the table.

“And you,” she said, handing me a clear blue button, “hold it to the light. Doesn’t it look like a trapped water droplet?” Then she picked up a red button with floral patterns and dangled it in front of my older sister. “This one makes a perfect emblem for a magical girl.”

When she saw us watching her again, she smiled. “Each button is a little spirit waiting to wake up. And this needle,” she said, raising the threaded needle, “is the wand. When the wand touches the spirit’s heart, it will stay on your clothes and never run away.”

“So,” she asked, “who wants to wake the first little spirit?”

We glanced at one another and raised our hands together.