> so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: breadmaking, birdwatching, and grief.
Hello friend,
> Making: Hawaiian rolls.
> Went to Eagle Creek Park with my partner and spent a while looking at the owls in the orinthology center. How little I know of birds.
> What I miss: braiding each other’s hair after swim practice (my sisters were much better at this).
> Reading: Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton. It’s like drinking a shot of olive oil, the way it wakes up all the senses and hits the back of your nose.
> Jesmyn Ward’s essay on losing her husband amist a pandemic.
I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house, terrified I would find myself standing in the doorway of an ICU room, watching the doctors press their whole weight on the chest of my mother, my sisters, my children, terrified of the lurch of their feet, the lurch that accompanies each press that restarts the heart, the jerk of their pale, tender soles, terrified of the frantic prayer without intention that keens through the mind, the prayer for life that one says in the doorway, the prayer I never want to say again, the prayer that dissolves midair when the hush-click-hush-click of the ventilator drowns it, terrified of the terrible commitment at the heart of me that reasons that if the person I love has to endure this, then the least I can do is stand there, the least I can do is witness, the least I can do is tell them over and over again, aloud, I love you. We love you. We ain’t going nowhere.
> From “My God, It’s Full of Stars” by Tracy K. Smith:
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.
He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
> Dance brought to you by Jeffrey Gibson.
Cheers,
Tiffany