Tiny Truths 77

Micro-essays of fleeting joys, wistful memories, and passing sadnesses from the past two years


Some summer nights as kids we smashed fireflies and rubbed the glowing remains on our bodies so we could see each other in the dark. The glow didn’t last long. Nor did the game. It never occurred to me that afterward the night sky was a little less light

@PaulCrenstorm • 21 SEPT 2020

This is anticipatory grief. I can discuss hospice care on the phone and hang up with no tears shed. Then, after a dishwasher is delivered but not installed due to complications, the tears flow like the water that flooded out of the broken machine into the kitchen.

@kerushi_san • 14 JUNE 2021

My 2-year-old insists on hiking in bare feet. When I give in, he runs squealing, feet padded by mud, moss, and fallen pine needles. I have much to learn from him about presence, and about permitting myself, despite obstacles, to fight for my own joy.

@ElizIversen • 24 JUNE 2020

Nine seconds to warm the applesauce for my mom’s morning meds. To replace my disdain for her neediness with a lighthearted care. To see sunlight
flicker as wind bends back the spirea branches, setting tiny white petals adrift. The microwave beeps. I go on with the day.

@suemell2017 • 13 AUG 2020

Now residents of a care home, my parents struggle with their new environment. I expect they have a similar feeling many refugees from far-away conflicts do. They are grateful to be safe, but would rather go home. The old life was good. Now, it’s just . . . impossible.

@onlydavesmith • 6 SEPT 2021

At age six, my granny’s garden was full of flowers, vegetables, and corn stalks a mile high into the sky. Persimmons and pecans littered the yard, yellow daffodils and purple irises blew gently in the wind. At age twenty-six, the garden that once was is no more.

@VoyagingTeacher • 6 MAR 2021

Shape of today: head bent in a lab, debugging while the sun rises, peaks and falls. The happiness of being uneventful, same. Hours spanning like white space between words and lines: makes life readable, comprehensible.

@theinnerzone • 13 APR 2021

A hurricane felled a tree last week. Here is its underside: roots, dirt, a tiny sea. Now a new universe will form. Things will burrow, things will climb, crawl, feed, hide, eat, spawn, fight, and care not a wit to justify themselves. They simply are. Because it fell.

@RuthNasrullah • 19 SEPT 2021

Art therapist Marge, red-haired and steady, introduced me to decoupage and I’ve stuck to it all these years since the hospital. Ripping paper, assembling anew, smoothing the seams with patient strokes of glue. An art form as layered and messy as I am.

@KTGanfield • 10 MAY 2021

Ever catch yourself joining in the chorus of this-week-is-dragging and how-is-it-only-Tuesday and thank-god-it’s-hump-day, then realize that you’re wishing for your life to hurtle faster toward its end, as if you don’t lie awake at night fearing your nonexistence?

@ohhsusannah • 14 JULY 2021

My 3yo packed up all her necessities & headed outside for an adventure. She imagined unicorns & picnics. She pendulumed through the air on her swing & imagined she was flying. She came in without her backpack, so I had to get it. Inside: a wand, a tiara, & her face mask.

@mjlevan • 21 JULY 2020

Most days are so out of step with a lifetime of rhythms. But as the door lifted, I emerged from air stale with last night’s pizza and the dusty rubber of stacked winter tires. With a wall of hot juniper, drought-baked soil and the season’s first cicadas, summer struck.

@onlydavesmith • 5 JULY 2020


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