unutterable gratitude for ordinariness

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Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Life here is so very ordinary.

One day we walk in shorts, the next we scrape ice and snow from our windows and shovel the drive.  Today was sunny and warm again.

The sparrows and finches gather in our bushes, waiting their turn at our window feeder.  With a rustle and scuffle they land, dip their beaks into the tray, and flick out the seed shells.  Squirrels give me a malign side-eye as they attempt to steal seeds.  We bang on the windows to scare them away from the feeder, but they have their revenge--they're building something under the solar panels on our roof.  We see them scamper across the wire and hear their scratching at odd times. 

Basketballs thwack the driveway all afternoon, as my little boys hone their handling skills.  They lower and raise the hoop with a thud and shout when they score.  Little M's childish sweet voice trills as she tidies her room.  The door bangs as Z returns from school, and her steps quietly ascend the stairs.  

And I sit in my chair and knit, knit, knit, while trying not to dwell too long on the threat of calamity.  I avoid the news; then I read all the news updates I can.  I prepare dinner and feel sudden gratitude for fresh water from the tap, our clunky old stove, and for the ordinariness of my life.  As I drive my kids to rehearsals, I watch the people of the neighborhood walking--with laundry, groceries, children--to and from their work, their homes.  I think about other people, all the way around the world, whom I will probably never meet, whose homes are rubble, and who heft their worldly possessions in suitcases as they plod toward the unknown.  Lord, have mercy.