TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

When we do something for the first time, we know it. We might be cognizant of it in the moment — heart swelling with the emotional novelty of the first date, the first kiss, the first flight on an airplane, the first time holding your child, the first trip to a new place in the world.

But often when we do something for the last time, we don’t know it will be the last. Only in retrospect do we look back and realize that kiss was the last kiss, or that meal together was the last meal together, or that last visit to a loved one’s home was the last time we’d be there. Only later, perhaps looking at photos, do we see what we couldn’t see in the moment: a closing of a door.

On the other hand, sometimes we’re acutely aware of the door shutting behind us. The last time you lock your door and leave your home before the moving van pulls away. The last summer vacation all together as a family before a child goes off to college. The last day at a job when everyone knows you’re not coming back. These are such poignant, bittersweet moments — living in the present but already feeling those experiences, those people and places, slipping into the past.

We move through life with so many doors opening and closing all around us. One of the gifts and burdens of being human is being aware of time, and impermanence, and our own mortality. That awareness keeps us grateful for what we have, but it can also make us fearful to lose what we have.

Sometimes, as we see in today’s poem, it’s difficult not to wonder if life will go on as expected, and if traditions will continue, or if we’re experiencing the end of an era. But still, there are ways to find presence in the uncertainty.

Summer Strawberries
by Cat Wei

This is the first time we’ve been together in the garden 
—mom, dad, and I—since that one time in high school.

It is mid June, I am heartbroken, and we are bent
down in the grass, picking the summer strawberries.

I’d forgotten this is effort. White noon brewing,
fingers moving dirt, grass prints pressed to palm.

This year the strawberries have bloomed in abundance,
my mother says, and my heart is full of strawberries

my lover has taken a bite of, pierced, sweet, and open.
This year, my mother says, we’ve had so many strawberries,

filling me a tupperware to go. How many times, I begin to think, 
how many times will I still be here with them

sifting slow heat in the grass, not knowing which 
will be the time I didn’t realize was the last.

I try not to go there. Dirt on my hands I try to remember,
feel what it is like to touch them.

"Summer Strawberries" by Cat Wei. Originally published in MUZZLE. Used by permission of the poet.