It’s autumn 2020 and America is a held breath. America is a coastal town before a hurricane. America is a stifling house that needs the windows thrown open. America is free-falling, counting on the parachute.
*
My husband (Sweet Lit’s web chappie) and I live in Tennessee, on the edge of Memphis. One of our friends had a sign up in his yard, one of those that says, We believe: science is real, Black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, love is love, no one is illegal, diversity makes us stronger. So we found out where they got it, and ordered one for ourselves. I admit, it sat in the house for a few days before I had the courage to put it up.
Each day that it stayed in the yard, un-vandalized, I celebrated. On the fourth day, I was gardening when two pickup trucks pulled up in our courtyard. Stepping inside to use my shirt to wipe the sweat from my face, I said to my husband, “I hope they’re not here to do something about our sign.” What I meant was, Be ready to come out and back me up.
But it was just some guys doing pest control for the neighbors, so I went back to digging.
Then one of them approached. “I like your sign,” he said.
We chatted about politics and voting, two young men and a middle-aged woman surreptitiously wiping the sweat from her eyes (a hot flash when it’s 80 degrees is no joke). Normally I’m an introvert, but it was so nice to have a conversation about politics that was neither tense nor despairing, that wasn’t a rehash of the same worries with the same people I usually talked with.
When I found myself back in the air-conditioning, I was smiling. My husband said, “That didn’t go how you feared, did it?”
*
In a time of worry and dread, contradiction and confusion, opposition and reckoning, only art seems able to grasp the human experience of it all. The poems, essays, and graphic pieces in this “supersized” issue of Sweet Lit are pieces of the bigger conversation that’s keeping us sane during these times. Like my short conversation with the two young men, these beautiful pieces of writing remind us what we have in common. Sometimes we’re all “sooty-snow-pile-behind-Sam’s-Club”, and we understand completely “When I say/a woman loves her dog/I mean/she is all that is good/and pure.” We’ve all felt unworthy and many of us have wrestled with difficult family history. But we’re still, through reading and writing, reaching out to each other. Still having conversations. Still putting out there what we believe in, not knowing what might come of it.
And we, at Sweet Lit, are grateful for that courage, or stubbornness, or whatever it is that keeps us writing when times are so fraught. See you on the other side, friends.
— Katie
