This thing was done to us. We have to do something. We have to strike back.

We resolved to do so. You could feel it in the air: Purpose, direction--flags appeared on car antennas, people's eyes got brighter. The cats got the spring back in their step and suddenly mice were no longer safe. Water began doing what water is supposed to do--seismologists detected the sound of thousands of first waves slapping down over thousands of restored waterfalls. The leaves changed, gloriously as I remember it, feeling to us like the miracle that leaf-change actually is. We thought: Wow, orange trees, red trees, yellow freaking trees, we are, all of us, alive again, alive still.

One night around that time, lying in bed, kids asleep, wife asleep, wind outside blowing through the trees forming, blessedly, no words at all--I realized that in our relief and excitement, no one had asked--of the wind, the swingsets, the ocean, the highway--no one had asked what, suddenly, seemed to me a few reasonable questions:

Strike back against whom? And where? And how? And to what end?

I thought about waking my wife. But it was late and we had to work next day, and I thought: the 'who' and the 'where' and the 'how' and the 'to what end?'--that is not now, that is later, that is yet to be decided, by the people who decide such things, people who are, like us, of good will, only more powerful, and know things we don't, and will proceed with discretion, in the full measure of time.

But when I woke next morning, it had already begun.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 4:01 PM  |