Seen at the Protests

All the usual signs. No Kings. Love Your Neighbor. Down with Fascism. A person dressed as a poop emoji. A baby with a sign: Adults, Get Your Act Together. A man holding a rainbow flag and carrying a poster: If they come for me in the night, they will come for you in the morning. People banging drums. People laughing. I’d never been at a rally this big in my city. 

Twenty thousand people the local news said this morning. And that’s not counting the rallies in all of the suburbs. In my little neighborhood two thousand people showed up. At noon they marched out of their houses and lined the streets. My husband and I joined them last minute.  

So different from the long-planned trip to the Women's March, 2017, my carefully painted stop sign. The word NO in white letters. Back then I was thinking NO to everything, and now here we are, and I still want to yell No. 

I threw that sign out years ago. But I saved the pink pussy hat. It was knitted by a friend. She pinned a card to one of the pink ears. The card says, “A women’s issue I care about is sexual assault.” Whenever, I think of the hat, the card, the friend, I cry. 

Why bother, someone wrote online. The gist was protests don’t lead to meaningful change, and look at us, years later, all of it for nothing. 

Okay. You be the one to tell that to my friend. 

In between protests I cleared more things out of my house. Lately, I am on a mission to shed stuff. A few weeks ago it was old correspondence. This week it’s bins of every item my kids have ever brought into our home. The bins are like compost piles. Preschool scribbles on the bottom, all the way up to college yearbooks. Why did I save all of it? What was I saving it for? Every night I sat with it strewn around me. Making decisions about what to let go, what to keep. 

Concert programs and school plays. First grade spelling tests and SAT scores. A story about a sad cow. Thirty-nine drawings of our once beloved black and white cat Zelda. A story about a sixteen-hour family car trip which apparently had been sidetracked by my husband who kept wanting to take pictures of covered bridges along the route. (I saved that. It was funny.) 

But I pitched the piano recital programs, the group soccer pics, thirty-eight of the Zelda drawings. It was exhilarating. It was dizzying. I had a stomachache. I was laughing. It was the accumulation of stuff, of years, of childhoods gone forever. It was the scent of baby blankets. The smudges of carrot stains on the baby bibs. A worksheet of the letter S, the messy squiggles of a three-year-old, the preschool teacher's note urging us to have our child practice more at home.  

I kept the things that meant the most. Sent the rest to the recycling bin. Then it was time for the second protest, and I was ready to burst out of the house. Yell NO at random strangers. Tell them it’s okay to let go of some things, but some things are worth saving. 

Tell them we were children, we had children, the children grew up. We went to rallies and we wore pink hats. We made art, we made signs, we practiced our S’s and took pictures of covered bridges. We sang, we wrote, we joined our neighbors, we marched.

We stood in a crowd. We were there. We are here.