Reflections after the polar vortex

Last weekend, after the polar vortex had left and the thaw came to our flatland, Marilyn and I went for a walk in Meadowbrook Park. For weeks, the snow and ice had kept us away. But on Sunday afternoon, with the sun out and temperatures in the fifties, the walking paths were busy with runners, strollers, children exploring—“Come down here, Mom!” one boy called from the edge of the brook. “It’s wonderful!”—all of us glad to be moving, to be outside, to be breathing without seeing our breaths.

Almost all the snow had melted, leaving puddles across the paths where the water had nowhere to drain.

I found myself looking down instead of up, seeing the landscape reflected, inverted, in the water. Bare trees and white clouds below me instead of above—a kind of magic. The landscape new again.

Why march?

After a week at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, I joined the Families Belong Together march in Iowa City before driving home. On Saturday morning, the ‘heat dome’ was still firmly in place as the crowd gathered behind the Old Capitol, and I wished I had brought a towel with me; I was drenched with sweat before the march even began. I knew I had to march; I had to do something. Contacting my representatives was clearly not enough. 

I have been marching since the 1992 March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., when hundreds of thousands of women gathered to speak up for reproductive freedom. Feeling solidarity with others and speaking out have always been energizing. 

Still, last Saturday morning, I wondered if marching would make any difference. Sure, the turnout was large, and the signs were clever, moving, angry, funny. We marched through town, past the Farmers’ Market, where a band played “This Land is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome” and cheered on the marchers. 

But, in our current political climate, would this protest do any good beyond making us feel good about ourselves? On my drive home past rolling fields of corn and across the Mississippi River, I wondered.  

The march began behind the Old Capitol. 

Eventually, I turned on the radio. On This American Life, I heard an attorney describe the excruciating process of getting information for her client, a father separated from his twelve-year-old daughter. On All Things Considered, I heard reports from marches all around the country. 

And I imagined the alternative. What if we had all been silent instead? What if the streets had been empty and quiet, everyone sheltering in the hum of air conditioning? Continuing to tune out the injustices that have gone on so long? What if the press had no resistance to report? The idea was chilling. 

We still have the right to assemble, to speak out, to hold our government accountable. The press still has the right to report on these events—and the press continues to do this even in the face of violent attacks and threats. We have these rights—for now. To keep them, we must exercise them, reminding ourselves and our government that our silence is not an option. 

This sign was a reminder to the marchers.

The march ended in College Green Park.

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Your experiences, favorite chants and signs, and other comments are welcome below.

Spectacular Prairie Skies

A recent evening storm that came literally out of the blue reminded me again why I love the prairie skies and Meadowbrook Park. As Marilyn and I began our walk around the prairie, I exclaimed at the blue-violet sky in the west. I wanted to gather the blue-violet in my arms and offer it to Amy, my beloved friend, whom I miss so much. She loved that color. On that evening, with the sky changing and the wind picking up, the thought of gathering the sky in my arms and handing it to Amy made me smile. I imagined her up in the sky like I used to imagine a white-bearded, smiling god when I was a child.

As Marilyn and I rounded the curve, stopping to photograph the western sky, a woman and two children joined us on the path. They had been heading home through the prairie to the nearby neighborhood.

"We had to turn around and come back to the park when we saw the sky," the woman said, laughing.

The sky was becoming more dramatic by the minute, and then the wind picked up in a way I had only experienced at sunset at Lake Michigan. There the waves became bigger and faster; here, the wind became louder and stronger.

I looked up.

"That's not a tornado coming, is it?" I asked Marilyn, the native Midwesterner, the one I have to urge to shelter during a tornado warning.

"No. It's not green," she said, not sounding as certain as I would have liked, as I noticed a twist of grey in the orange sky. Our car was on the other side of the park; turning back wouldn't be any faster than moving forward, so we kept going, walking, laughing at the wind and then the rain, stopping to watch a deer and her baby, and being greeted by a rainbow when we finally got to the car.

I felt like I'd been to another planet and back again.

Signs of the Times – at the Women’s March in Chicago

Ten days have passed since the Women’s March, and the exuberance I felt then—briefly—has been replaced by worry and dread, alternating with fierce determination and only the faintest glimmer of hope. Still, every time I look at my photos from that day in Chicago, I smile a little and feel held and lifted up by that crowd, a crowd so dense we had to move slowly when we moved at all.

The sun came out in Chicago that Saturday. The evening before, as Marilyn and I arrived in the city, heading north on Lake Shore Drive, the fog was so thick, our usual view of the skyline was completely hidden. The day after the march was grey and colder.  But that Saturday morning of the march, the sun shone on us and warmed us; we shed coats, but the pink hats with cat ears stayed on. All the aerial photos of the marches around the country show a rose-tinted crowd.

Though the organizers cancelled the official march in Chicago because the crowd was too big for the route, some of us marched anyway—slowly, cheerfully, stopping right in the middle of Michigan Avenue when needed.  As we moved across Michigan and down Jackson, walking the one block to Wabash, we chanted now and then: “THIS is what democracy looks like,” we responded to “TELL me what democracy looks like.” Or we repeated, “Black Lives Matter.” The chants moved through the crowd like waves.

Every time a train passed on the L tracks further west of us, we would cheer loudly, holding up and waving our signs. The people on the train would wave back at us, some of them holding up signs, too. Marching behind Marilyn and me was a family: grandparents, parents, and a baby girl, who was nine months old that day her mother told me.  Every time the crowd around her cheered for an L train, the baby smiled and clapped her hands, her palms sometimes slipping past each other; clapping was still new to her.  She never seem startled by our cheers; rather, she seemed to understand the rhythm of the marchers and to respond to it. The baby’s grandmother told me her other daughter was marching in D.C., that her family was represented at marches. This baby will probably hear stories of the marches from her family. But I imagine she will have some memories of her own, too, settling somewhere in her body and her mind.

Last week, I read an article about professors and librarians at Northeastern University (where I got my Master’s in 1990) who collected up signs that were discarded after the Boston Women’s March and will catalog them as important cultural and historical artifacts. Many of us who were at Women’s Marches took photos of the signs, our efforts at recording this historic moment and movement. I’m including some of those photos here. May they remind us and inspire us to keep on keeping on.

We are going to be protesting for a while; we’ll need more signs and more inspiration. If you have slogans or stories you would like to share, please leave them in the comments. I’d love to read them.

That's Marilyn holding her sign (which we got from Emily's List) and the flowers a stranger gave her. 

I love this photo of the crowd--even if the crowd meant we could not find the friends we were to meet from our UU church until later, when they left the crowd and when we could send and receive texts again.

As we walked from the rally site to the Trump Hotel, we saw these little girls marching down a closed-off Michigan Avenue with signs they had made.

Near the river, we were astonished to run into friends who live in Chicago and whom we had planned to try to see later in the day.  How we found each other in a quarter million people--entirely by chance--is beyond me!

These teens were hanging out right in the middle of Wacker Drive and were happy to have their photo taken. 

I just had to add this photo.  We were waiting in the crowd, and I could see a gap over people's heads; I asked someone why there was open space that we weren't spreading into, even though we were packed so tight as we waited to start marching. Was it fenced off?  "Oh, no it's not fenced off. That's the grass. We were asked not to go on the grass." "Oh," I replied, and we both laughed and said, "Midwest nice!"  I then held up my camera to get a photo of the grass.