April 25, 2020

Orientation

The house faces due east. It stands witness,
daily, to the surest thing there is aside from
men convincing themselves they're right,
all evidence to the contrary – or in the face
of no evidence at all, more commonly. I can
neither count the ways men lie to themselves,
nor count on them, on account of the lies posing
as knowledge. But I can count on the Sun.

The house is mostly mute, save for the
occasional creak here, scratch there, and the
soft, steady hum of the refrigerator. It knows
the better part of wisdom is silence. It knows
a store of cool silence is needed to buffer a
mother from the noises of children in the day,
joyous and welcome as they are, and also
from the unaccountable clamor of men's lies.

The former shall be abided, invited in fact,
nestled into this east-facing house that stores
just the right amount of silence for the job –
the work of sheltering the children from
the worst of men's arrogant fabrications, so
far as is possible. The morning sun pours
through the front windows, a powerful
disinfectant – and a silent one, blessedly.

Here, in and around this small, quiet house,
we can get our bearings. The children grow
strong, bearing witness to truths that fly below
men's radars, low-frequency miracles like the
rising of bread, the sprouting of potatoes, the
budding of the eldest cherry tree. We store
these miracles in the cool of memory, traces of
the warmth in a mother's heart at sunrise.