Photo: Stephen Paris on Pexels.com
It has long lain
In limbo,
All voices ebbed
Into dust.
As silent letters
On chalkboard,
Watch the desks
Left to rust.
At one time
Children chanted,
Poems rose
Learned by heart.
But they’d grown
And time hastened.
School-house days
Did not last.
Now it sits,
Heart quite emptied,
And still waits
For the past.
For the dVerse Challenge: Limbo
It will be tea for one. Again.
She boiled the water in the pot they’d gotten on their honeymoon in Venice, and she spread the tablecloth he’d always said reminded him of his grandma’s parlor (and had always added “in the best way possible” when she’d frown).
She rearranged the mismatched chairs left from the two sets they’d combined when they moved in together, but then returned the plaid one so it rested half-turned to the table and half-facing the radio. Like old times. Like the many evenings when she’d mend some this or that or mark her students’ lessons, while he’d lean forward onto one palm and watch her from the corner of his eye even as his attention was on his favorite broadcast.
“I have eight favorites,” he’d often chuckle. “One for each day of the week and two on Sunday.”
“But none as favorite as you,” he’d always add, just because he knew it pleased her to be reminded that she mattered more …
She turned the burner off when the kettle wailed, a lone wolf in the night. She spooned some of the good tea into the teapot, and poured the water on the leaves to let it steep, then capped the pot and dressed it with the cozy she’d made from his favorite sweater when it had too many holes to patch and too much love to throw away.
“You don’t toss away much,” he’d tease her, and they both knew it was both compliment and understanding. They’d grown with little and later had even less, so she had learned to not let go of things too easily.
“I do keep you around, don’t I?” she’d tease back … some days only half in jest for how he’d manage to so exasperate her. Muddy shoes inside the house and socks that never quite made it into the hamper, and an infuriating tendency to not recall the milk or pay the mortgage. Never mind remembering her birthday or their anniversary.
Or the time he’d strayed from vows … and bore a hole into her heart that never fully mended.
She’d forgiven him for that. Of sort. Or as much as anyone can a betrayal. For she’d come to understand it was based less on his disrespect of her as it was on his embedded insecurities. He’d cried in shame when he’d confessed his indiscretion and she’d ended up comforting him, feeling both tender and resentful.
He’d bought her the tea caddie after that. The hand-carved thing of beauty had cost a ridiculous amount and did little to improve upon the one they’d had already … other than in how it served as a reminder for the cost of pain and of his commitment to penance.
She passed a finger over the caddie’s rounded top and felt each curve like a canyon of memories in her heart. When she’d fallen ill after their failed attempt at parenting, and the bills kept mounting, he’d almost sold his beloved radio to make payments. Yet he’d refused to discuss letting go of the caddie.
“It is worth a small fortune,” she had tried.
“And that is exactly why it is befitting of you that it stay,” he had replied.
She sighed and sat and poured the tea into her cup and watched the steam cloud the glass as the fluid rose like unabated sorrow.
It was their anniversary. The third since he’d left her, this time to where no tea caddie and no amount of tears could remedy.
“Do not hasten to follow,” he’d begged her promise when they both knew it was time. “Go on and live for me.”
Perhaps she wouldn’t have promised had she known quite how bereft she would be without him. Yet she had given him her word, and she was not about to introduce betrayal into the fabric they had so labored to repair.
It will be tea for one, again. Today.
For the Sunday Photo Fiction Challenge
“They do not remember who they are.”
The old man’s voice was somber without judgment. A skill born of patience shaped by the combined weights of history and time.
“It is why I brought them here.”
The elder regarded his visitor. His dark eyes pools of wisdom deeper than the lines upon his skin.
A silence stretched.
“They will not find it in this place,” Sorrowful Skies said finally.
Disappointment filled the woman’s face.
“They will sleep in the lodge tonight,” he added. “Tomorrow, they will walk like their ancestors. In bare feet on breathing land. Then they will remember.”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Photo: Philip Coons
Empty window
Recalls
Days of voice,
Filled up halls.
Rocking chair
Holds the space
For creaky floors
Under pace.
Tattered curtains
Still long
For a hand
To belong.
The old house
Holds its breath.
When time spins
Back again,
They will come back.
Amen.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Anticipation
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Life to hatch
Life to stall
As a change
Transforms all.
While new wings
Rise and fall,
Will it a ‘before’
Recall?
For the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Changeable
Earlier today, as I was attempting to video a particularly adorable little one, my phone froze. It would not budge. It refused even to turn off. Total strike. When it finally relented, responded, and restarted, it claimed that the MicroSD card that had lain securely in its innards, accumulating goodies, was “blank or has unsupported files.” Gulp!
Removing and remounting the tiny tech did nada. Restarting again? Zilch. Thousands of photos, videos, music and docs – more than 27 Gigabytes’ worth – gone! Some are backed up, perhaps, someplace. Many? Who knows.
I breathed. I zoomed through the phases of grief. I put the phone away. I fed the toddler some fruit. We both had a sip (and spill) of water. We chased dogs, a little boy with a ball, an ant, and three pigeons.
Back home, I tried to view Micro (it felt right to name it, after it turned my day on its head) on the computer. No luck. Not only did my laptop refuse to load the card’s info, it would not even acknowledge that Micro existed. To add insult to injury, Micro’s ordeal somehow managed to keep it invisible even as it shut down the whole card-reader drive so it would not read any other memory cards, either. Micro had suffered Total Amnesia With Driver-Scrambling Influences.
Even according to the normally super helpful remote-‘hijackers’ of computers, the poor data that had lived on Micro, is to be presumed evaporated. Oh, my phone returned to work deceptively fine. The contacts are intact. So are any WhatsApp images (normally so infuriatingly immune to living anyplace but the prime real-estate of internal storage, and now more snobbish than ever, being the only ones to have survived). It is the photos I’d taken myself, the videos I’d shot, the files I’d stored, the music I’d downloaded, that have disappeared into the abyss. Whatever caused this massive ‘phone syncope,’ it damaged only the deceptively giant brain of my little Micro, but by all accounts it did so spectacularly!
So here I am, a bit disoriented and feeling a touch of loss and more than a bit bewildered. I can’t help but worry that whatever had caused the irreversible amnesia might pay a return visit, especially as the culprit remains unexplained (and unrecoverable). It doesn’t help that certified geeks spent hours trying to figure out how one scrambled Micro-SD managed to make other cards not be readable just by association, and continued to do so even after repairs, rebuilds, refresh, and the odd time-travel of restore.
Being prone to seeing synchronicity as messaging, I’m wondering if today’s drama is a metaphor for the contagion of energy and chaos. So timely with the current snags and ripples in the fabric of memory and history.
Adieu, photos. Adieu, videos. Adieu, all manner of notes. I remember some of you very fondly. I admit to not quite knowing what many of you were. I will miss you all, anyway.
One day (soon, if Murphy has a say in it, which he tends to in such cases), I might find myself looking for an image or a file that I just know I had ‘someplace’, only to realize that it was probably part of today’s giant exodus.
In the meanwhile, I hope this data-crater becomes an opening to new energies and an invitation for new memories on Micro-The-Second. I choose to view this as (yet another) lesson into the temporary yet indelible existence of every moment, be it captured into tangible memory or not.
For the One Word Sunday Challenge: Giant
Photo: Amitai Asif
It is in your grasp
To take hold
To absorb
Offered light
Life’s rewrite.
It’s within your soul
To recall
To be bold
In the hollowed out space
Of your mind
To breathe deep
To grow whole.
For The Daily Post
Photo: teachingmomster.com
“I failed the test,” she sighed and let her book bag slump to the floor.
“What test, and I’m so sorry.” I responded.
“Social studies. History stuff. I studied so hard!” She plunked herself into the chair. Dejection personified. “Who put all those stupid names and dates in there, anyway?”
“Names and dates can be really difficult to remember,” I noted. “I find it helpful to connect them with the story of what happened, or with something else to remind of what the name or date relate to.”
“Yeah, well,” her eyes rose to meet mine, accusatory at my not understanding she just needed me to let her vent. “But you are not mnemonically challenged!”
For The Daily Post
Photo: Amitai Asif
In the weathered rock
Old hands of time still tick away the measured strokes
Of chisels
Embedding prayers
And faith
Into the stone.
Aged but clear
The corner breathes centuries
Of memory and hope
Of light and lore
And much too much
War.
Vintage Phrenology: thegraphicsfairy.com
There are over 1,000,000 substantiated reports of child maltreatment annually in the US alone (US Department of Health 2013). The impact of maltreatment on development and health is indisputable. The last two decades showed brisk research in the area of trauma and dissociation all over the world. It is therefore quite surprising to find psychology textbooks to be so behind the times (and behind the data) on covering child maltreatment. This leaves hundreds of thousands of students a year with less-than-accurate information that may impact their ability to identify or understand the aftermath of child maltreatment.
In an important article (also see full link below), Brand and McEwen review the three leading introductory psychology textbooks and how they address (or not address) childhood maltreatment and its aftermath. The results are distressing in lack of citing of current data (as in many textbooks on psychopathology).
One can hypothesize why prominent textbooks will not sufficiently cover such an important topic (one would think they would find it essential to cover well if only for the known health effects of childhood maltreatment across the lifespan, in both physical and psychological health, costs, and healthcare utilization). Maybe it is as simple as using outdated resources or not keeping up with research and known data. Maybe it speaks to more widespread issues of denial and minimization of childhood maltreatment. Maybe other reasons. Regardless of why the textbooks are lacking, the reality remains that the textbooks leave students un-informed on the topic.
The good news is that this can be changed! The data is available–it just needs to be included and reviewed better!
Hopefully having more awareness to this will allow students and faculty to challenge the choice of textbooks and to demand better coverage of such a relevant issue. Students are shortchanged when they are under-informed and when data is slanted or may appear to be biased or outdated.
What can you do?
Let your faculty, librarian, and fellow clinicians and students know that our college students deserve a more cohesive review of childhood maltreatment. Share the article below. Talk to professors who teach these courses and support them in seeking better balanced textbooks. The research is available, it simply needs to be included rather than avoided. Let us work together for improving information in education!
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