We bleed common grace
like berries in the sun; words
drip from fingertips
I wrote this final haiku months after I wrote the others as the closing paragraph to the collection of haikus my dad and I sent each other during the pandemic. Rather than trying to sum up our experience in this final haiku, I wanted to acknowledge what we had done in the midst of it--writing these small missives to each other, so ordinary in their subject matter, and yet somehow profound in their particularity.
I wrote and re-wrote these lines while sitting at a coffee shop a few blocks away from our kids' new school. We had recently moved to London, the city was opening back up, restrictions were being lifted, and life was returning to some semblance of normality. I felt removed--both in location and time--from the disorienting days at the beginning of the pandemic out of which these haikus came.
I was struggling to find words when I came across this picture of my son holding freshly picked strawberries on a chilly day last May. The sky was bright but the wind was blowing and we needed our jackets to stay warm--unusual but not unprecedented for Virginia at that time of year.
We moved down the rows with another family--kids working in twos and threes to fill pallets with plump, red strawberries, eating their fill along the way, juice dripping down their chins, fingers stained red.
In that image, I saw what my dad and I were doing in midst of this pandemic. We were picking moments out of our days, looking for a sweetness in the sadness and uncertainty, finding the common graces of our ordinary lives dripping from our fingertips as we wrote to each other about what we'd found.
And now we have a record of these ordinary graces--sleepy-eyed children, a LEGO-strewn floor, the flight of a cardinal, the leaves of a tree. They were unremarkable in and of themselves, but when held in the midst of fear, confusion, and apprehension these commonplace moments anchored us to our lives and gave us the gift of being present to them during a time when that felt difficult.
Whether consciously or not, we packed our haikus with daily grace enough to remind us this is a life worth paying attention to.
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