I turn on the news, and once again, the world feels like it’s on fire, all bitterness and lies all heartache and scorched earth, people in power preying on the fears of the ones who lack it, and I wonder where we are supposed to find hope and why anger has taken the microphone, and where are all the good people of the planet, and where is God in all this mess? The washing machine dings, and I head down to the basement to put away my family’s laundry: my husband’s bathing suit, my denim shorts, and my son’s tiny socks, which are not so tiny anymore but still a quarter of the size of the ones my husband wears. And the jumble of the tiny next to the big and the adult socks next to the kids takes my breath away. There are grass stains, and there are dirt stains, and there is always a hole in someone’s toe, and yet, the mess of it is somehow beautiful, and the mess of it somehow reminds me of how lucky we are to have these socks, to own this machine and to be able to hold one another. And perhaps that’s where we find God, and love, and a way out of this chaos: in our sock drawers and our laundry piles, in the faces that sit around our dinner table and come to our home on a Saturday afternoon, and the neighbors who we live beside peacefully. Perhaps we are the ones who have to say: like you, I am tired, like you, I am afraid, like you, I want the hate to stay away so that we may carry on with trying to create a world where everyone is cared for and free, so that we may make our love the loudest thing about us, and continue to make this place beautiful.
Please note - this piece was originally published on Medium.
That’s nice
I really appreciate this poem, Megan.
I am always left wondering… what happened to the left sock?
It left, or it was left behind??
I can’t ever seem to make up for lost matches… and for some reason it’s hard to dispense with all of the ones left behind, unmatched.