by Anne Lamott
People sang, and babies cried, and your feet started to hurt, and you wanted to go home, and just then the broad-bottomed Palestinian women started chanting, “This is what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.”
Wow: that’s the prayer I said the morning after the peace march: Wow. I felt buoyed by all those people walking slowly together down Market Street, by the memory of the peacenik dogs with kerchiefs around their necks, the Mothers in Black, and the Peace Sheep. Then, amazingly, only a few days later, the very first bulbs began to bloom. Within a week, there were dozens of daffodils in the yard. When this finally happens in late winter every year, I’m astonished. I’ve always given up. In November and December when I plant them, I get swept up in the fantasy that the earth, after so much rain, will be rich and loamy. Planting bulbs sounds like a romantic and fun thing to do, but it never is. The earth is rocky and full of roots; it’s clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, yet you dig little holes for the ugly, shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover everything over, and you know you’ll never see them again—it’s death and clay and shrivel. Your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails are black with soil. December and January have been so grim the last few years, and this year the power kept going out, and everyone was crazy as a rat. Yet here we are in February, with war drums and daffodils everywhere, and poppies waiting in the wings.
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Copyright © 2005 by Anne Lamott
Cover photograph of hymn board © 2004 by Joshua Sheldon
Book design by Stephanie Huntwork
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint:
“Monet Refuses the Operation” by Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems.
Copyright 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press. Lines from “Annunciation” by Denise Levertov, from A Door in the Hive. Copyright 1989 by Denise Levertov.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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First Riverhead hardcover edition: March 2005
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