Gas prices
Iread the paper from my recliner, sip a good blend from my favorite mug, flavored with a new white mocha creamer I’m glad I tried out — and I notice how high gas prices are today.
Then I turn the page to a story about the war. Russia is still advancing, taking Ukraine. And I think about all the families now fleeing from their homeland, for their lives.
On the same soil that a similar war, led by a similar dictator, had been waged before — and not all that long ago, not really. Some of those who survived it are there now. Watching their children’s children outrun the same bombs and blasts.
I go outside to our side porch and sit on my thinking bench. And I imagine sitting across from a mother, a refugee woman. I imagine what she might have to say. What her voice might sound like. Where it might shake. Where it might break. On which words would her breath catch and her eyes blink and need to quickly glance away.
What would she tell me? About her sudden exodus. I would sit with her and listen. And from my bench, in Northwest Georgia, I hear this Ukrainian mother speak …
“I won’t think about all the things I couldn’t bring because we didn’t have time. Everything we left behind — extra puffer jackets, extra blankets, extra socks, extra toys, my marriage certificate, my daughter’s first dress, my mother’s ring, my father’s books, my grandmother’s shawl, my grandfather’s cufflinks, the old country recipes, all of their photos from before …
My husband stayed to fight. Last night we slept outside. And it’s cold.
My grandmother said she’s more scared now than she was then —‘ when you’re forced to flee a home that you fled so many years ago in another time, but fighting the same war.’ She said, ‘I never imagined I would have to do it all over again.’ It’s the horror of having us with her this time, generations born out of her will to survive.
That war took the family I have only heard stories about — the family I never got to meet. The war that robbed me before my birth. Now my footprints are engraved on the path where their feet once tread. Maybe this is the closest to them that I will ever get.
I have a son in my belly, a daughter at my side, my husband stayed to fight a war his father’s father fought before. And it’s cold. I hope we make it to the trains before we face another night. Because it’s cold.”
From my bench, I heard her words. Across the world, I have heard her speak. I wonder if she whispered those things to a cold wind that crept up behind her as she fled her home. I wonder if the wind lifted her utterances and blew her voice to my ears or if it’s just my overactive imagination.
I think about all of the Ukrainians now displaced. Refugees. All because an evil man wants something that doesn’t belong to him.
But gas prices are higher than ever, and we wonder how we’ll manage a trip around town.
They’ve got bombs and missiles. We’ve got beds, full bellies, and clear skies. Still, it’s a shame gas prices are way so high.