A Travesty

A journalist asked this Syrian refugee girl to smile.  What a huge ask.  What an impossible ask.  How fucking insensitive.

What we do to children is often unbearable.  Not only do we bomb their communities, kill their relatives, their parents, brothers and sisters, but we ask them to smile.

I think I know why he asked her.  He wanted her to stand for something more than just a little girl with a broken heart; maybe something to do with resilience, with the will to carry on.  Maybe he wanted his photo to signify something more than just a young girl with a grief laden face.  I don’t know.

I must say I sometimes agree with the idea that photographers can “steal our souls”.  I doubt he could actually steal her soul, but he added to her burden.  He asked her to smile and she, wanting to please, accommodated him. Damn him or her.  Damn them.

She breaks my heart.

 

Grandma Poodie

This picture captures her perfectly I think.  Her white hair had gone yellow at the ends.  I would brush it and braid it and pin it up.  It was like cotton fluff.  Her fingers were soft on my arm. There was not a mean bone in her body;  she was all kindness.

When she was young, she and her sister were itinerant teachers.  They would ride out on the prairies visiting small schoolhouses on the prairies.  I wish I had known this when I was young.  I would have loved her stories.  How odd that the people we are closest to are sometimes the one’s we know the least.  I had a sense of her—her sound, her feel, her  smell and touch and the taste of her apple pie; the taste of pie crust hot out of the oven with just a little cinnamon sugar.

I knew her without knowing her.

Literal thinking

 

.

 

 

Playing with the wind

Rob and I spent the day with Wilder yesterday.  I took him outside in the backyard in the afternoon when it stopped raining.  There was a high wind and the trees were just dancing, and the sun came out in fits and starts.

He ran all over the yard.  I chased him with a long bit of grass and tickled his neck.  He understands tickling and jokes and chasing and whooping.  He plays back.

Later on I gave him lentil soup.  He loved it for a bit and then up-ended it on his tray and attempted to pick it up with his fat little fingers and put it back in the bowl.  We had lentils everywhere.

I had brought him a peanut butter cookie and with much yumming and humming and pointing, he ate it all up (I shared).

After much fresh air and fun, Rob and I were exhausted and, apparently, so was he.  He laid on the floor with Sharkey(his blanket), and Rob and I laid on respective sofas with out phones and we all settled down.

It was a perfectly beautiful day.