It’s a rainy Thursday morning and my ninety-year-old grandmother calls me to say she’s going for a walk. The usual mile, she says. Which, as of late, she has walked almost every day before nine in the morning. Over the past eight weeks, walking has become a new daily ritual. In her adult life, there have been very few rituals which she has maintained with such loyalty. With her, there is no laundry day or set dinner time. Birthday celebrations have no statute of limitations. The bills get paid and the lights stay on, but the crossword puzzle takes precedent over both. Today, she is retying the laces on her white Keds to attend to the new ceremonial habit she’s created for herself. Today she’s giving herself permission to reinvent a pattern of her own reality. Today she’s going for a walk.
In his poem “Grief,” Raymond Carver describes a friend who continued to set the table and open the kitchen windows for his wife long after she died, writing, “Such display / I found embarrassing. / So did his other / friends. I couldn’t see it. / Not until this morning.”
In the first few months of our new year, we have felt the stinging, unprecedented loss that presents itself without ritual or shape—a spectrum of loss so vast that it is without definition. This poem, as with the extraordinary pieces in this issue, explores the idea that both our most ordinary and sacred rituals might serve a larger purpose—that we are somehow held together by what we create for ourselves—not despite the loss we experience, but as a result of it. Our creations—whether it be going for a walk or setting the table for a loved one who will not return, are essential in how we evolve and find value in our existence. Hannah and I hope that the pieces in this issue reveal a sense of newness among the rituals, moments, and objects which have always been known, and those that are changing. We hope they allow you to see the world exactly as it seems. We hope they remind you of the many things it might become.
With warmth,
Jesse Ewing-Frable & Hannah Newman
Sweet Tree Review