Forever ago, I wrote about having a uniform. It’s changed some over the years. One thing has stayed the same: A wool neckwarmer for fall, winter, and spring, so I don’t catch my death of cold.
The site where I buy these merino wool tubes releases new colors from time to time, usually a few a year, and if the colors match with my aesthetic, I’ll treat myself to one (and by treat, I mean buy a two or three in a spasm of stress spending).
Since I’ve been wearing them for so long, I have every color they make that I like. I found one of my favorites on clearance ages ago. It’s since been discontinued. I’ve worn it so much that it’s beginning to develop holes. For a Same Same person like me who for comfort will wear the same thing every day, eat the same thing, do the same thing, listen to the same thing, just to keep my world spinning at the right angle, the idea of one of my favorite articles of clothing falling apart and not having a replacement was … upsetting.
I went to my first protest since before leaving for Tobago. We returned from our trip July 25, and I fully planned to jump right into my pre-vacation schedule of protests, zoom calls, and writing to powerful people’s minions hoping for someone to listen (a.k.a. emailing my representatives).
I didn’t take into consideration that three weeks of international travel (including that giant hill that I joyfully marched up and down multiple times a day, every day), followed by three nights of camping the next weekend, was going to crank up my body’s inflammation level to an 11/10.
I’m still flaring, but I’ve been able to divert a few spoons away from my joints being on fire all the time back to activism.
We’re back in the U.S. after three weeks in Tobago, our first trip there since covid.
It was tough going to the same places over four years later, and seeing how big the kids had gotten. They were no longer aging an hour or a day at a time, but four years all at once. Our oldest wasn’t able to join us for the first time. Our youngest doesn’t remember our other trips. Two kids are now young adults. Two more are about to be. More than that, *I* felt older.
We’d completed a colossal temporal leap forward in between this trip and our last, and all the things that had happened in between were on my mind, which meant I cried kind of a lot.
This week was terrible. This past six months have been difficult, but this week before Easter felt like the climax of all that, and not in a good way.
Part of the reason it was bad is because it was bad, and part of it is because instead of letting all the feelings and experiences flow through, I let them take residence in my body.
I’m popping in with another book. It’ll be a short blurb, so you don’t have to click through to read the whole thing.
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, compiled and edited by Cate Malek and Mateo Hoke, was my first nonfiction read about Palestine. The book is part of a series called Voice of Witness, a nonprofit organization that “uses oral history to illuminate contemporary human rights crises in the U.S. and around the world.” It was published in 2014.
The book interviews sixteen people: fourteen Palestinians, an Israeli settler, and an Israeli activist. Each person’s account is told in narrative form, based on interviews with the subject. The people interviewed are all different ages and backgrounds, and include a fisherman, an NGO worker, and a physics professor, just to name a few.
I enjoyed reading firsthand accounts of each person’s experience. In addition, though, I found it interesting and telling how similar these real life accounts were to the fiction books I’ve read on the subject. While those stories came from the imaginations of the authors, they are grounded in reality.
I often don’t read the appendices of books, I read this appendix all the way to the end because the information included (from the history of Hamas’ tunnels to poetry) provided fascinating context for the personal accounts in the book.
Storytelling has always been a part of my life. It’s why I majored in English, it’s why I became a nurse, and it’s why I write. Hearing the stories of real Palestinians – and knowing these stories cut off ten years ago, with no way to find out “the rest of the story,” was a powerful reminder of the ongoing nature of the narrative.
