One Summer in Savannah

by Terah Shelton Harris

“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,” my father often quoted. Every day, the tide rolls out, new water rolls in, with no memory of yesterday, a fitting refuge.

“There are questions we may never solve, no matter how much we want to,”

Trauma doesn’t punch a clock, but you can set your watch by it. It works overtime most of the time. But it can be smothered like a whisper in a storm.

“It is up to us to give reason and purpose to events that would otherwise be meaningless and arbitrary,”

The idea of mortality affects everyone differently. Rarely are we privy to the moment of our death. Most of the time, death

sneaks up on us like a sneeze.

Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.

“When all is done, and my last word is said, And ye who loved me murmur, “He is dead,” Let no one weep, for fear that I should know, And sorrow too that ye should sorrow so. When all is done and in the oozing clay, Ye lay this cast-off hull of mine away, Pray not for me, for, after long despair, The quiet of the grave will be a prayer.”

“When all is done, say not my day is o’er And that thro’ night I seek a dimmer shore: Say rather that my morn has just begun,— I greet the dawn and not a setting sun.”

“Love is never complicated. The circumstances are but never the love.”

“We are in the same place, at the same time, occupying the same mind. I am in you, touching you, being you, quite literally.”

Forgiveness, I’ve learned, is like a door. You can open yourself up to it or close yourself off from it at any time. We can’t rewrite history or change the outcome. Life is a series of choices. And we live in and with those choices we make.