Washing Time

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Dear God,

It would be wonderful if You would put all that I have seen and experienced this week in one nice and tidy box where everything is folded neatly, and stacked, and sorted by color. And then You can shoot it up with some of your extra light so it glows in the dark. Please?

We’ll do it together. Here are the things I want in the box. I’ll pick them up and you fold and put them in. 

  1. Looking forward to escaping Washington, DC during the inauguration. Too many people. People who hated Our good and sincere friend with a purple passion and kept stabbing him with pins and daggers and he was so brave about it all. And every time they stabbed him again, it was like they were stabbing me, and it hurt. And now they are so happy, and I am happy that they are happy, but I’m dizzy too because they changed from haters into laughers so fast that it makes me wonder whether it can be true that all that hatred and all those daggers and pins carved something beautiful. How is that possible?
  2. I floated down into my wooden nest surrounded by snow. And all I wanted to do was to talk with You. But We had to wait and love others. So I waited as patiently as possible and loved as devotedly as I could all excited with anticipation for our date.
  3. But You cancelled it!
  4. Since You are never wrong, I figured that You wanted me to show you that I could be flexible. So I bent forward and backward and side to side with a Mona Lisa smile.
  5. But the truth was that You had a job for me to do.
  6. A two bedroom apartment where my beloved aunts lived together for twenty seven years and one lived alone for ten more years. We have two weeks to empty it. You recruited me to pull boxes of treasures out of high dark corners. The bathtub is now a trash bin. My beloved family so neat and tidy, so rich in orderliness and love of shoes and purses. Treasures from the past: a 48 star flag, clay images of mirth. Decades compressed into space with walls. World War II things, Hallmark Christmas ornaments, photos galore of strangers and young aunts and uncles, dads and sisters and cousins, of the dead family when we were alive and before we were alive.
  7. Katherine Hepburn was Scottish last night, young and beautiful in a world very different than the one where deliriously cheering celebrating crowds start fresh to have their way of making the world the place we all want it to be, very different than the snowy town of proud and rugged poor, of World War II red star banners and tidy drawers. I saw a million worlds parade before my eyes. Herodotus and Xenophon stories of war and wisdom. He said in 500 BC that happiness is not found in wealth but in a life that has completed the earthly phase which is devoted to others.

 Okay, do Your magic!

 With love,

 Evangeline

My child, small and thoughtful, let Us squeeze the Time out of your pieces first. See the jeering, the disappointments, the muddy things that water helps to wash away. Thank you hydrogen, thank you oxygen. Now, we have the essence of them all: hope, love, beauty, joy. We will keep this part of everything you want to store. Time corrupts; but time corrupts evil. It is My favorite joke. Now let us fold your treasures together. Do you see the glow? Are you happy?