Walls and Windows

This next piece is from my Wednesday group.  It was an exercise that I really liked.  I am trying hard not to make it political, just personal.  It was basically done in about an hour that night.  I worked about an hour more at home to try and clean it up.  I probably could have spent more time on it, however I have a deadline for a piece that is due on April first.

I spend seventy-five percent of my day in the kitchen, give or take.  Of that time ninety-nine percent is spent at the kitchen sink doing dishes.  I have the proof with my dish pan hands.  They are a chapped, cracked, scaly, peeling mess.  I joke that the steam from the soapy water is my spa day.  Everyone in my family laughs, except me. 

My kitchen sink has only one attribute as far as I am concerned; there is a window for me to look out as I scald my hands for hours on end.  However, my view is that of large brown bricks.  Directly out of my window is an old carriage house that obstructs my view of our beautiful back pasture.  Just to the right of the brown mass is the quonset with its rippled grey steal that heaves up into the sky.  No views around that cold mass of metal.

A few years ago, my children made me a birdhouse for my birthday.  When the time came to put it up, they eagerly asked if it was going on the maple tree up by the road.  Was I going to hang it in the oak tree out the front window of our living room? 

“I know, mom!”  Exclaimed my son.  “How about we hang it down in the apple tree by the fire ring?”

“I know exactly where I want to hang it.”  I say without hesitation.  “We will hang it on the side of the old carriage house so I can look at it every time I do the dishes.”

I had hopes of watching a family of birds raising their young through out the summer. 

Our southern border has been a topic of disheartening conversations, whether it plays out on the news, around dinner tables or talk among friends.  It seems everyone has their opinion on the subject.  The only dispute I see, all the families being torn apart.  Children are taken away from their families.  The images of tiny little children hugging tin foil blankets and stuffed in cage like rooms still sours my heart.  The idea that it is morally ok to separate a family is despicable.

A parent has tough decisions to make throughout their child’s life.  What kind of a parent walks for up to a month through devastating conditions risking everything, including life, to cross an imaginary line in the sand?  I have always told my children I would move heaven and earth for them.  I would do anything and everything for my kids.  I would carry them for a month just to get them across a line in the sand if it meant there was even the slightest chance they would have a better tomorrow.  I am that kind of parent.

Would I be willing to just let some stranger come and take my child away from my loving hands and place them where I could no longer see them?  What if I had no choice?  What if there was no touching them, calming their anxious minds, making sure they were safe or terrible still, not knowing where they were.  What a horrid feeling that must be.  There is a mom in a detention center looking at a wall. Perhaps she has a window, I doubt there is a birdhouse.  How does she feel knowing that on the other side just beyond that wall is a land?  There out her window a land of hope, yet she can not see that through all the obstacles.

I’ll stand tonight at my kitchen sink and I believe the water won’t sting quite as much.  I’ll ask my husband and children to hang out at the kitchen island, perhaps they can play a board game while I do the dishes and keep me company.  I’ll look out my window and wait for the birds to come back and build their nest.  The hopes of spring are in the air. Maybe, just maybe, tonight I will let the dishes just sit until tomorrow.