It's Just Me, Trying To Make Sense of a Sad World

I haven't been able to really sit down and see images of the total destruction in Haiti until today. I'm haunted now by the images of the bodies piling up outside the morgues and am regretful that I turned on CNN. I don't do well with visions like that. I still carry around in my arms those two children in the movie Slumdog Millionaire. You know, the ones living in the cardboard tent...on the flats of a landfill...eating the garbage? And that was a movie.

I will give money to the UN for aide. But what I'd really like to do is bring home one of those babies I heard crying in the background as some American journalist stood in a makeshift hospital talking about how the orphans were kneeling at the bedsides of their dead mothers. And now I can't make their cries go away.

So I eat chocolate.
And hug my children a little tighter.

Stories of loss have been circling my inner ear for weeks now. Two local boys killed in a house fire on Christmas eve. Paul Bunyan came home with images imprinted on his brain of family circling the sole survivor of a car crash in which his best friend died. Local artist and my children's favorite author shot himself in his car last week.

I guess it comes in tidal waves. And I'm not that great of a swimmer.

So I eat more chocolate.
And hug my children a little tighter.

And because I can't buy one of those Haitian orphans, although I'd like to, I do a little retail therapy closer to home and I buy my favorite Stephen Huneck print, so we can all remember the man and his sense of humor.



And to remind us to sniff each other a little more closely, just in case we need to remember the scent of each other if, perchance, we don't get to see each other tomorrow.