I swallow hard as I force my eyes to banish the intense sadness pervading my heart. I look at Malik, his eyes vacant, his jaw set in something I felt to be anger, disappointment, distress, and sadness all at once. “He’s the seventh friend I’ve lost, Ms. Wahba. He got shot in the leg and back, and they kept shooting him.” He finishes this sentiment, and I look attentively at him, though he won’t meet my eyes. He is focused on the pencil clenched in his hand, leaning as if casual, into his chair, but with a rigidity of unspeakable pain. I put my hand on his shoulder, not knowing what to say at first, but this relaxes him. He loosens his grip on the pencil and unlocks his jaw. He casts his eyes down, looking towards the pencil he aimlessly begins to twirl, his eyes unfocused. “I’ll never be allowed out again now. He wasn’t even doin' nothing. My mom says I can only go out to the malls indoors now and I’m tired of it. I just want to go outside.” I take my hand off of his shoulder, looking at the clock, knowing a lesson needs to start soon, and I need to be my chipper, uplifting self for the other 20 students coming into the room. I hesitate a second on my response, lowering myself to his level at his desk.

          In that moment, my first thoughts, all at once, are these. It’s not easy to feel the pain of this boy, 16 years young, experiencing the loss of a friend for the 7th time since middle school. It’s not easy to feel what I have never felt, but so ardently wish they didn’t have to, ever again. I can’t relate to this pain, but I do my best to help to heal it, with kindness and a listening ear. My empathy seems born for these experiences, in these moments. 

          It’s also not easy to be the comfort for them when these children tell me their stories so openly, from wounds so fresh. It’s not easy to be their rock, their support, when I want to cry and scream at the world. Instead I have to teach, and hide that worry. I worry least of all when they’re in school, and particularly my classroom. I call to mind images of driving through the city, passing sun-bleached teddy bears and deflated balloons tied to street corner light poles in memoriam. I see rag heaps that may or may not have a person inside of them, victims of strange fates, inexplicably tied to violence in this city. I picture the future of many of my students, and fear for them, worry for them. 

          Then I picture Malik’s mom. Mrs. Jones is a single mother, with two sons in high school. The feelings of worry I have are multiplied a hundredfold in her, no doubt. Her experiences of Baltimore are greater, growing up in the drug wars and deep gang violence of the 1980s and 1990s. She has achieved what many in the city would deem impossible simply by raising such good boys, and to such an advanced age, who are not involved in the violence. She has even been able to send them to a Baltimore County school, outside the realm of the violence of that city. And now, regardless of that intensely hard work, violence is still threatening her boys. 

          With this imagined image of her worry-stricken face, I turn to Malik from my frog-like stance, squatting next to his desk. I meet his eyes, and he stops twirling his pencil. “I’m so sorry, Malik. I can’t tell you how much I wish you didn’t have to feel the pain of losing so many friends. Your mom is not punishing you, she is terrified for you. She loves you and your brother more than anything on this earth, and you have to let her feel like you are as safe as you can be. Do it for her, and think of her when you feel angry and trapped inside, or at the malls. I’m so sorry, Malik.” He looks at me, and the vacant expression in his eyes is replaced with a cloud of pain. Just pain. He looks empty, and yet overflowing with emotion all at the same time. He is defeated, trapped, and angry, but he looks resigned behind it all. I give him a small smile. He returns it with his eyes and says, “Can I go to the bathroom?” 

​          I know he means he needs a walk. “You can walk around in the halls as long as you need,” I respond heartily. “School is the right place to go walking,” I say as I quickly write him a pass for the period, so glad he could suggest some small way I could help him. As he walks out the door with his shoulders bowed, carrying the weight of a thousand sons who didn’t come home from the street, I do my best to clear these emotions for the time being and focus on the lesson I’ll teach, when the bell rings. Like a switch, I’m in teacher mode and at the board explaining the lesson. But in the back of my mind, I’m angry and tired all at once for Malik and all the boys I teach who have lost, and could be lost. I say a silent, mental prayer for this city’s violence to just stop.

          Every day I scroll social media, there seems to be another horrific act of racist violence in this country. Americans are desensitized, most feel used to it - it's so integral in our culture. But we cannot accept this. Black people cannot live in fear, and it is the least white people can do to make safe spaces for people of color, and have open ears and hearts to understand that their experiences in America are different than we can even comprehend. There has been a string of violence against black people, even during quarantine when no one is meant to leave their house. Ahmaud Arbery was shot while jogging. George Floyd was suffocated by a police officer as he begged to be let up. And these are the extreme cases that make the news. Know that every single day, black people are being kicked out of businesses for wearing masks. They're being followed by police called by a white person uncomfortable by their presence. Black women are being beat and dragged from their homes by officers without a warrant, at the wrong address. At the same time officers are ignoring their calls of domestic violence, not going to certain addresses "for the officers' own safety". 

          As white people, we need to use our privilege to protect those around us and stand up for injustice when we see it.  We need to look out for each other, sign those petitions, and have open, honest conversations with our students, friends, family, and children about the necessity of equity in our country.

​          More than this, we need to have a policy (ideally upheld within our police forces) and in our actions that denies the opportunity for violence against people of color. Active bystanders are the future of change. Walking back from the bar and see a cop outside? Just keep your eyes peeled that the group of black women gets past them safe. Sitting on your balcony at home and see a lone black woman at the bus stop? Just keep an eye that no one messes with her. In any of these situations all you have to do as a white person is say "hey, what's new? Haven't seen you in forever!" And start a fresh conversation with a positive tone.

          Calling out racist behavior for what it is may not always work, but being a positive light in a situation will make the racists look like fools and back down. Be an open ear for people of color: listen! Why do they feel that way? As human beings, we have no right at any time to tell someone else they aren't feeling what they are. Oppression is very, very alive in this country. There has only been 50 years of "equality" since the end of segregation, and 300 years of bondage through slavery before that. Racist attitudes will not die easily. We have a lot of work to do, but we CAN do it. White people, use your privilege to disrupt the systemic oppression -that is how we ultimately dismantle it.

Photo: This is my Nana's grave, where her body resides in Reading, PA since 2001. But as a world traveler, I can say she's been much more often with my my mother, my aunt, and I in countless countries and innumerable adventures.

​I lost my uncle Jimmy a week past, and will bury him here with his sister next Friday, May 29th 2020. This has been a year of loss for many, but we must take comfort in the air they now inhabit, not grief in the extinguished flame.

March 2020, Week 4 of the COVID-19 Quarantine
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     The wind is fierce as it blows the door shut behind me. My parent’s home is surrounded by nature. When I step outside I'm reminded of the contrast between my world growing up here in Honey Brook, and my life in Baltimore, where I cannot go outside or feel nature in any capacity but a small balcony, and the whoosh of cars on the avenue block out any birds that happen to roost in the sole tree in our complex. My gratitude for Honey Brook brings a smile to my face as the chill breeze and the sun's warmth alternate on my skin. 
I begin with a walk through my mother's gardens, turning clockwise to walk across the patio and unlatch the gate. A statue of St. Francis of Asisi, characteristically cradling a small bird in his hands, overlooks the hillside garden, worn with 30+ years of sentry duty in the sun. The red rocks and mulch are dotted with large quartz and fieldstone, a plague to some in this farming county, but a beauty for us. I pass the depression of a pond we used to have, now filled in beyond much recognition except to we who remember. In my mind's eye, I see little me scooping tadpoles and trying to pet the mother frogs as a child. As I continue around the bend, passing nondescript blooms not yet visible, and brown, wintered bushes of plants even my mother forgets the name of, I pass a holly tree. In my mind it is still a small bush, but of course it's been over 30 years since it's planting. I am continually amazed how memory holds its shape regardless of reality. Here I pause to write in my journal.

     The smells of the garden are that of cut grass, wind, and spring pollen. The indescribable scent of freshness, youth, blossoms. I make a mental note to open a window when I go back inside. I hear a background noise I’ve come to adore: “peepers”, a frog variety common here, coming from the southern neighbor’s pond. I hear countless bird species in “the Jungle” - my childhood name for the wooded area behind our home that scales the hill we live atop. The nearest road is below our home’s hillside expanse, at the base of the slope. I don’t hear a car at all on this walk; indeed in a day I only hear 1-5 since the stay-at-home order has been placed. It’s never loud ordinarily, but this is a particular treat nonetheless. Instead what I do hear a few times is the echoing, drifting clip-clop of a horse. As it nears I hear the accompanying clatter of a buggy, its metal wheels without shocks, and once a horse brays and snorts as it rounds the bend of our slope. Sometimes, I choke with a happy sob at the sound. It is invigorating to me, like the blustering wind that passes from north to south, or the thunderclap in the night. It is in harmony with nature and my soul, a sound I hear in the depths of my mind from my cacophonous Baltimore apartment when I cannot sleep. To hear it alive, is like a confirmation of a long-held suspicion, or to wake from a nightmare to see you’re actually home safe in your bed. “It is real, it wasn’t a dream, I’m home.” 

      In the years since I’ve lived here full-time, I’ve never stopped visiting it. And now that all five of us have returned, it is alive again. I feel the land breathing with each gust of wind that blows my journal pages up. I chuckle at the greeting, or prod, and rise from the path by the holly tree.

     I continue the walk as it completes my sunwise circle of our home. I cross the parking pad, filled with our many cars from our many exterior lives, stoic beasts with no immediate purpose. I rejoin the path, and pass my favorite patch of the garden - the remnants of the herbs my mother planted when I was young. The soil here is fertile. A kind of fertile cursed by my gardening mother, and grandmother when she helped install these gardens in the ‘90s before her death in 2001. This was a farming paddock for untold years before the house was built, and the resting place for its animals when they passed. Their return to the earth has made growth unstoppable here. The herbs I pass are prolific mint, batches of lemon balm, and “weeds'' of wild violet, milk thistle, and speedwell. My mother had never planted any of them, and has meshed over, remulched, and even stone-covered these herbs countless times. And yet they continue to grow, and spread. The smell of fresh, country mint - as the variety is known here in Lancaster County, PA - is strong, empowering. The lemon balm melds with it in a vaporous scent that awakens and revives. But it is not just the smell and the feel that entices me. It’s that nature has persisted, insisted, that this part of the garden should be hers. 

​     I go back into the house and grab a scissors and a strainer. I’m making mint tea today. I’ve seen, felt, heard, and inhaled the gardens today - the need to taste it is strong. I trim the tallest stalks of mint and fill the strainer, rubbing the leaves together in my hands to release the smell, a perfume that will stain my skin all day. I smile throughout this activity. It’s simple, but yields a great reward of hydration and purification. There’s no need for sugar, this mint is sweet. As I take a last look around the garden for the morning, I look over at the blooming cherry blossoms. I make a mental note to read below them today.