travel this road in the night?
Rain beats against my kitchen window in the falling dusk. I can hear
geese outside, in low formation over the valley. Winter is letting go.
Pausing by the stove with raincoats draped over my arm, I stop to
stir a pot of pea soup, sending up clouds of steam that mist over
the window. We’ll be glad for a warm cup during the night ahead.
The six o’clock news comes on while I am headfirst in the closet,
rounding up flashlights. It has begun—bombs are falling on
Baghdad tonight. I stop in the middle of the floor, listening, with my
hands full of boots, a red pair and a black. Somewhere another
woman looks out her window, but the formation of dark shapes in
her sky is not a skein of spring geese returning. Skies billowing with
smoke, homes alight, sirens wailing. CNN reports the number of
sorties and tons of ordnance like box scores in a baseball game.
The level of collateral damage, they say, is as yet unknown.
Collateral damage: shielding words to keep us from naming the
consequences of a missile gone astray. The words ask us to turn
our faces away, as if man-made destruction were an inescapable
fact of nature. Collateral damage: measured in overturned soup
pots and wailing children. Heavy with helplessness, I turn off the
radio and call my family to supper. When the dishes are done, we
slip into raincoats then out into the night, driving the back roads to
Labrador Hollow.
While it rains bombs on Baghdad, the first rain of spring falls on
our valley. Soft and steady, it penetrates the forest floor, melting
away the last of the ice crystals beneath the winter-weary blanket
of leaves. The splatter and splash is a welcome sound after the
long silence of snow. To a salamander beneath a log, the first