As I Enter This Dark Time

All my energy spent. The build up, the roar, the wind passes over. I remember how miserable I felt eight years ago, on the eve of a new presidency—and, now, new trepidation. The feeling of not being safe. The nerves leading to my brain, neck, shoulders overloaded and prickly—the kind of thing an animal feels when hunted. Flight or fight.

But, it’s not 2016.

In 2024 I live in a tiny house next to my daughter, next to the garden under a bed of dry leaves, next to the garage that holds my bike and the bike with the kid trailer that I pull out to ride my grandson around, where, also he leans his balance bike against the plywood wall.

He brings me a book. Across the deck, to my front door and knocks and hollers, “Hey, Grandma!” I open up and he climbs into my lap and we study the pages of a toddler graphic novel about an adventurous frog on a bike that winds his way through a dark woods and meets a dragon—but also males friends and learns he can be very brave, if only he continues to move forward. At the last page he and the new friends he has collected watch a fabulous sunrise from the edge of a cliff.

Here’s to the next 4 years.

Acceptance

--Robert Frost

 

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud

And goes down burning into the gulf below,

No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud

At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know

It is the change to darkness in the sky.

Murmuring something quiet in its breast,

One bird begins to close a faded eye;

Or overtaken too far from its nest,

Hurrying low above the grove, some waif

Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.

At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!

Now let the night be dark for all of me.

Let the night be too dark for me to see

Into the future. Let what will be be.”