Pebbles
by Suzanne Stenson O'Brien
Originally published for MOMbo
I have shiny pebbles in the bottom of my washing machine that I have washed for almost two years. Each load of cold socks peeled from the bin dings and clinks as the pebbles fall back to the bottom, too large to wash through the drain.
I keep my pebbles—some white, some brown, one black: like a little country—in my washing machine intentionally. They rotate and grind in memoriam of our august innocence, summer 2001, moving through life in a pocket, carefully selected from the turtle sandbox in our yard, or clinging to a tropical print towel that spent a sunny afternoon on the shores of Lake Superior. The pebbles remind me of a time "before" terrorism; before fear and confusion carved this line in my brow; before I craved and loathed my Times subscription, in that sultry summer rocking my family carefully and slowly toward the horizon.
My pebbles are cleansed at least five times per week. They are very clean, perhaps even eroding now in my washroom, as they grind along with the underpants, towels, and continual flood of t-shirts and corduroy. Their staying power also reminds me of other mothers just like me, who cry and protect, except they wash their clothing on rocks and wash boards, hung in the sun or like frozen boards to dry. My Whirlpool hums gently, a familiar reassurance, agitating without toil as it pulls its strength out of a plug in the wall, from the pile of coal mounded in the river valley outside my window.
I'm agitating also, about we pebbles in the swirl of global events. The reek of sweat, anxiety and the promise of more suffering seems permanent and lasting. The tear in our social fabric is unravelling before my very eyes. Opportunistic wannabes are grabbing at the loosening threads, from across all oceans, from within and with out. Sometimes I'm afraid for the future.
I need sages and elders to show me how worse fear has been vanquished, how more hapless leadership has wizened, and how a gracious, grateful life has returned from even darker days. I try, like a teenager waiting for his Weezer t-shirt, to let the cycle proceed, to let the spin begin, and to simply rest my hands along side the others, on the rocking, whacking steel corners, whilst we wait the rinse cycle.
I await the generous voice of calm...the as-yet emergent leader who can quiet the shrill barking of the opposition and can calm the war drums, which are remarkably similar (in my head) to the sound of my wash basin out of balance.
I plan to leave the pebbles in my washing machine as a reminder to these things and that we are each just a stone in the river. We change the currents and can even create a dam of stones—at least temporarily—against the wild rushing flood. And perhaps together, stone next to stone, solid yet ephemeral, we provide a steady crossing to the little ones who will follow where we lead.