ode on this one and only day

walking

The world is a jewel box, and I am a jewel within it. I am an undercover fairytale princess, and everything glows to my eyes. The grass is preternaturally green, the trees sparkle, and I can surely see vines stretching toward the sun before my eyes. The birds have caught on -- they arrange their songs like jazz musicians, with syncopated tenor beats, soprano be-bop, accented trills. I watch the tulips open their petals wide to take it all in. I am alive with wet braided hair, an empty canvas bag waiting for books, hoping in the glow.

library

Stillness reigns; quiet overwhelms me. This is how a library ought to be, I suppose, but who knew it was possible? Campus--even traffic around campus--is notably subdued. Typically-packed rows of tables boast one or two lone readers, slouched, with green-strawed cups of iced coffee. The stacks are hushed and dusty, and the front-desk workers have time to chat, to look over my titles, to smile into my eyes. I see more friends than usual--the statistics, I suppose, are skewed in favor of meeting like-minded folk in the post-finals stillness. I walk home with the weight of my seven volumes reminding my shoulder that I am alive.

laundry

I soak and wash winter sweaters, preparing them for a summer tidy in their bottom drawer. I wash the party dress I wore to my cousin's bridal shower over the weekend, hanging it to dry on the shower rod and admiring it every time I pass by. I wash my corduroy blazer and find earplugs in the pocket, a gift from my father at a concert months ago (my baby brother's concert). I eye my pile of mending and promise myself to do it soon. My hands smell like laundry soap for the rest of the afternoon.

bread

Measuring amber honey into a measuring cup, I contemplate this change: once upon a time Josh held a job that meant weekly free bread, and my own baking stilled. Now we've moved on from that job, and our freezer stock of loaves is running low. So today I bake. I knead under the watch of a kitchen timer, dig the heels of my hands into whole-wheatey dough to the rhythm of Joni Mitchell on the radio. Give-us-this-day-our-daily means something else when you have dough in your hands. I mull over this a while. The dough rises under a tea towel, with no one watching it, and how it does this I have no idea.

reading

Now I will take up my next task, teach my washed palms to hold worn book-cloth-covered tomes, take my blue-ink notes and fall into the sixteenth century. Perhaps these women writers baked bread and washed laundry; perhaps someone else did these tasks for them (in certain times and certain places, a single pair of hands never held book, pen, dough, and soaking linen). Perhaps they knew the scent of finally-spring, the shine of morning on waking grass, the dandelion laughter that throws the sun back up to itself, calling, "Here you are! Here you are!" Perhaps they knew a day that was, in all its dailyness, a one-and-only day.

Dame Julian on Prayer

"Our Lord is full of gladness and delight at our prayers; he looks out for them, for he wants them longingly. For by means of his grace they make us grow like himself in condition as we are in kind; this is his blessed will, for he says:

Pray inwardly although you think it savors you not, for it is profitable even though you feel nothing; though you see nothing, and yes, though you think there is nothing you can do; for in dryness and barrenness, in sickness and in feeblesness, all the while your prayers are most pleasing to me, although you think it savors you little or nothing. It is the same with all your living prayers in my sight."

(Julian of Norwich, trans. John Skinner 80-81)