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DL Davidson

writer, photographer

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February

February 14, 2021

Beach View

February

I moved back to Huntsville, my childhood home, after living in South Florida for many years. I was excited about coming back home, which I had left almost 30 years before. I was joining a pediatric ICU practice with colleagues that I respected. My father, whom I worshipped, was living in Huntsville and I was looking forward to spending more time with him. 

Alice Mcduffee, one of my new medical partners, was concerned about the fact that the weather in Huntsville was going to be very different from the subtropical climate in which I had been living. “Winters are long and intense,” she said, “you just have to get through February.” And over the years, her words have continued to ring true for me. You just have to get through February. 


Donna Kay

I don’t know why February is such a difficult month—but it is. By February, I’m sick of long, dark nights. The sun rises too late and sets too soon. I’m weary of sweaters and boots and having to put on a hat, gloves, and down parka just to run errands. In the hospital, February was always the time when physicians got into personal arguments—the office pediatricians were unhappy with hospital physicians not doing enough to help them and the hospital physicians were tired of pulling up the slack for private physicians. Nurses were in rebellious moods. The Chief of Staff usually tried to avoid clinical settings because of the barely submerged hostility of most hospital staff. We were all ‘sick and tired’ of winter, I think, and by February it manifested in most of us as smoldering free-ranging resentments.


Moonrise

But I think the February effect is evident in spheres other than just healthcare. It is significant that February seems to be a month of political turmoil culminating in presidential impeachment. Trump was acquitted in his Senate Impeachment trial in February 2020 and 2021. Bill Clinton’s final impeachment verdict was in February 1999. Andrew Johnson was impeached in February 1868. In addition to impeachment, another significant February political event was the internment of Japanese-Americans by President Roosevelt’s executive order in 1942.

The disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in February 2003 was a particularly searing event for myself and most Huntsvillians. Our hometown was intimately involved in the space exploration effort and this event was a personal tragedy for many of us.

February 2020 found most of us wondering if the novel coronavirus just reported originating in Wuhan, China might manifest as a new SARS epidemic? February 2021–after a year long pandemic struggle—and most of us realize that life as we knew it is gone forever.


The universe in a shell

I find myself this February watching the Senate impeachment trial of Donald J Trump. In the last four years, this corrupt, morally incorrigible, and incompetent man has done more damage to my country than I thought could be possible from a single individual. But then again, he has been assisted and emboldened by the complicit members of his own party. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from COVID-19 because of his disinterest and incompetence in leadership, hundreds of children have been traumatized for life because of his utter disregard of human rights. And for the first time in American history, an attempt to overthrow our democracy originated out of his administration. Despite the overwhelming evidence, the complicit GOP collaborated in his attempted coup by refusing to condemn his efforts. I am reminded of the march on Rome by Mussolini’s Blackshirts which failed but nonetheless resulted in Mussolini achieving fascist control of Italy’s government. I am reminded of Hitler’s Beer Hall coup in Bavaria which also failed, but within a decade Hitler was in total control of Germany’s government.


End of day

I’ve said this so many times before—history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. Why is this? Probably because human behavior is not novel. We have a limited repertoire of behavior and generations repeat the same mistakes over and over. Are we witnesses to the same events that have happened to other failed democracies over the years? Why do Americans persist in believing that we are exceptional? 

The last time Trump was given a free pass by his party was over his attempt to hold taxpayer funded financial aid as a lever on a foreign leader for personal gain.  When his party refused to condemn his corruption, he was emboldened enough to begin amassing a paramilitary force and pointing them at government officials that refused to give him the power he demanded. What will he do now? Are we looking at the same second acts that occurred with Hitler and Mussolini?

I have been isolating myself from those that I know empowered Trump. After the events of today, I find them as complicit as the GOP leadership in the events I am very fearful are about to transpire. They are as responsible for the death of Americans and the brutalizing of young children as Trump. They are as responsible as Trump for the lethal cracks in the foundation of our democracy. I cannot abide their presence.

As Edward R. Murrow said about McCarthy, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”


Abba

It is time to leave this country.

No words

February 10, 2021

Dreaming of Home

Bring me my dragons!

Emergence

Memories of tulips


Beach glow

Bouquet

My way

Earthshine

February 6, 2021

Earthshine

On certain nights
When the angles are right
And the moon is a slender crescent
It’s circle shows
In a ghostly glow
Of earthly luminescence

Earthshine
A beacon in the night
I can raise my eyes to earthshine

Earthshine
But you’re out of reach
Form a dream to rise to earthshine

Floating high
In the evening sky
I see my faint reflection
Pale facsimile
Like what others see
When they look in my direction

Earthshine
Stretching out your hand
Full of starlit diamonds earthshine

Reflected light
To another’s sight
And the moon tells a lover’s story
My borrowed face
And my third-hand grace
Only reflect your glory

Earthshine
You’re still out of reach
Form a dream to rise to earthshine


Neil Peart, a Canadian songwriter and drummer with the rock band, Rush, penned the lyrics to the song, Earthshine, included on the hard rock band’s 2002 album, Vapor Trails. “Peart, one-third of the Toronto band Rush, was one of the world’s most worshipped drummers, unleashing his unearthly skills upon rotating drum kits that grew to encompass what seemed like every percussive possibility within human invention,” wrote Brian Hiatt in RollingStone magazine.

Neil died in January 2020 from glioblastoma.

The NASA Space Observatory website features an image, overlaid with Peart’s Earthshine lyrics, and a description of the phenomenon.

Earthshine has been described by native American tribes as “the old moon resting in the new moon’s arms” which is a description I’m particularly fond of. Basically, Earthshine is sunlight that has taken a detour. Earth’s reflected glow from the Sun bounces to the Moon and then back to our eyes, enabling us to see the Moon’s ‘dark side’. 

Storm Light

January 28, 2021

The morning started with a strange pink haze…and a sense of lighter air, then exploded with torrential rain, thunder and lightning. The dogs and I scurried into shelter and then watched our beach through rain-soaked windows.

Stormy day…and too restless to read, I decide to focus on eliminating some of the sand brought in to our coastal cottage by my bare feet and puppy paws. But, English Lit student that I am, the activity reminds me of a brilliant poem by Susan Estabrook that I will share. Caution–I am not responsible for any metaphors you may imagine 🙂

Susan Estabrook

AN AFTERNOON WITH HOOVER

I take him out of the closet because it’s time.

I lug him across the floor;

his old parts creak.

If he could just think, it’d be,

“I’m too old to do this every week.”

He’s lucky that’s all I demand.

So I drag him to the middle of the room

and uncoil his cord,

gently unknot the cable from

the hooks on his shaft.

I locate the open receptacle on the wall

and insert his pronged end;

he turns on quite easily.

And then we begin.

My hand guides him back and forth,

back and forth,

across the dirty carpet,

sucking up and rejuvenating,

making new.

I find comfort in

the noise he makes—

a rasping, chortling, not-quite hum

as he lifts and beats

at the same time.

Back and forth,

back and forth,

inside the table legs

outside the couch

exploring under the chest

rolling over dust devils

probing unseen reaches,

humming, rasping.

My hand tires, as his old moves

aren’t what they used to be.

So my body gets into it.

My thigh pushes him forward,

his handle dug deep in my pelvis

sweat dripping between my breasts

from the effort.

We retreat to the bedroom,

repeating the action.

Back and forth,

in and out,

over and under.

And then it’s time for more.

I bring him upright and

he shudders.

I pinch his bag,

testing its capacity,

and he shudders again, as if

knowing what’s coming.

I go to the closet and bring out

the long, snaky, ribbed hose

which extends his reach as far

as my needs require.

My fingers probe the roundness as I

guide the tapered end

to the receiving mouth on the body

where it fits so perfectly.

He turns on again now

we reach a new height,

and strive for more.

I twist him and pull,

stretching him to his ultimate,

pressing the issue and not letting

him rest, allowing no leeway in the

satisfaction I must receive.

Pulling and pushing, my hands,

my thighs, my pelvis

interacting,

his hose in the mouth

where it sucks up whatever

is in the way.

Reaching, always reaching

nearing completion

until finally,

finally

we’re finished.

It’s over.

He chugs his last and turns off,

sitting idle

spent and smoking.

After a minute, I remove his prong

from the open receptacle,

wrap the cord around his shaft, and

put him back in the closet, where he’ll stay

until I need him again.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Indigo Light

January 20, 2021


When Lady Gaga started singing the national anthem, the tears started. Continued through Garth Brooks and J-Lo. This was the America I recognized—one of diversity and talent and achievement. Loud, different, proud. 

Not knuckle dragging gorillas peeing on statutes in the Capitol. 

And when Kamala Harris took the oath of office, I was so glad that I lived long enough to see an intelligent, empathic woman claim leadership in my country. But the tears really accelerated when I saw Kamala stand next to Joe at Arlington. For some reason, that really emphasized, to me, the reality that a woman was in the second highest office of our country.



And when Joe Biden spoke for unity in my country, for Americans to end the “Uncivil War’ I responded to those words with such longing. I hope, I truly do, that the nightmare of the last few years will be coming to an end. And I will heed the words of my President—I will really try to open my heart to forgiveness for those who empowered a tyrant. 

For me, though, one of the most important lessons that I have learned in the past few years is the recognition that people who look like me, sound like me, people that I work with and socialize with, can knowingly empower someone that abused children and will not speak up against it even when they have become aware of it. Once I have seen that, I can’t unsee it. So, I will give them a wide berth. Life is much too short to tolerate values that one does not agree with.



I think I really lost it when Amanda Gorman, the very young Inaugural Poet read her recent work, “The Hill We Climb.” I’ve included it here with my photographs because her words resonated with me.



“The Hill We Climb”
Amanda Gorman

When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect, we are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

So we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: that even as we grieved, we grew, even as we hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired, we tried, that we’ll forever be tied together victorious, not because we will never again know defeat but because we will never again sow division.




Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one should make them afraid. If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in in all of the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare it because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. That would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy, and this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can periodically be delayed, but it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith, we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us, this is the era of just redemption we feared in its inception we did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour but within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves, so while once we asked how can we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us.



We will not march back to what was but move to what shall be, a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free, we will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, our blunders become their burden. But one thing is certain: if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left, with every breath from my bronze, pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one, we will rise from the golden hills of the West, we will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution, we will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states, we will rise from the sunbaked South, we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.



Thank you, Amanda, for giving voice to my emotions and my hope today. You remind me, once again, that youth represent our future….and it is very bright indeed.

Diana Lyn Davidson

Coastal Dreaming

November 16, 2020

Gratitude List

by Laura Foley

Praise be this morning for sleeping late,

the sandy sheets, the ocean air,

the midnight storm that blew its waters in.

Praise be the morning swim, mid-tide,

the clear sands underneath our feet,

the dogs who leap into the waves,

their fur, sticky with salt,

the ball we throw again and again.

Praise be the green tea with honey,

the bread we dip in finest olive oil,

the eggs we fry. Praise be the reeds,

gold and pink in the summer light,

the sand between our toes,

our swimsuits, flapping in the breeze.

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