I have a present for you. It’s an image, a story, a retell.
I read it in a newspaper, and when I got to the end, I was left with an intake of breath, a small huff, almost an “oh” of surprise.
I cut out the column and taped it in my notebook. It has been there since. When I page by it, I pause, reread, and the same “oh” rises.
Writers are sometimes tapped, particularly this time of year, to sum up, to coalesce information, to note and summarize. So let’s start with that. What do we look like this late December?
I see a people on edge, not quite sitting back in our chairs, never fully relaxed. We are unnerved by violence that comes out of nowhere, that comes walking up store aisles, that comes walking up church aisles, that blows us away with its random disregard for beating, breathing life.
Each time we turn to the news, we are told to be unnerved, reminded to be unnerved, warned to be unnerved, lest we forget to be unnerved.
I see a people who are mostly good, but — perhaps from exhaustion — are learning to turn from each other, to hunker, to separate and bunch into like-minded groups who can tsk-tsk, or run from, or rat-out, or condemn those of other-mind.
We’re getting the false idea that it’s just easier to stick to our own kind, as if we are herds, gazelles in startle mode, awash in panic and moving in full flight, fast as prairie wind.
We don’t know any longer which leader is lying, which is telling the truth. We are beginning to wonder why almost all of them tell us, again and again, that we are not safe. Of course we are not safe. It has always been so and will always be.
What we need to hear as well, now and finally and again, is that we can be called to something besides fear. We don’t know what’s ahead. We never did, but there was a time when we could see danger and at the exact same time celebrate possibility — like rocket flight, newfangled TV, polio vaccine. Now we fear the unimaginable will shear us, knock us flat, take all, take everything. Too often we forget small dreams and big ideas.
We need to be called to celebration. We need nobility, integrity, compassion, hope. We need to be reminded we are a nation of soarers — we fly, rise, burst with possibility. It’s who we are.
We are skirting the edge of some serious crevasses this Christmas. Off kilter, we peer down and around.
We forget to look up, forget to look forward toward the chance of “Oh!”
We must not forget hope, and dream-come-trues. We must not forget the small, almost holy, moments of “Oh!” They are gifts. They are reminders:
This year on the Kankakee River, in eastern Illinois, a 5-year-old girl and her Grandpa pushed off from shore in a boat. It was a Wednesday. They were to fish, swim, and chatter-talk like only 5-year-old girls and their patient grandpas can.
Something went terribly wrong — how often have we heard that this year? Something went terribly wrong and a search commenced.
Not until Friday did rescuers find the body of the grandfather. He and his granddaughter had probably stopped on a small island to swim. He drowned. The currents were strong. It had been days. The rescuers turned the sad and inevitable corner from rescue to recovery and continued to look for the body of the child.
They surmised she could have been washed from the island to the main shore.
I picture them in boats, grim faces, sick in their guts, trying to prep for the discovery, for facing the parents, for hard, hard things.
I can imagine what impossible mirage they thought they saw: a small angel walking behind trees, almost as big as a weightless low balloon. But she was real.
Movement, a slash across their eyes. And then she walked out of the woods, the 5-year-old girl, naked, scraped up, dirty. Small as all get out, but alive.
She was holding a handful of raspberries.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
