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Drabble Corner

Michelle Swisz

This column is being written late, the direction of my life being up in the air with medical issues getting more intense for the moment. Who knows where I’ll be living in a couple of months, and etc.? But all that is swept aside in the last few days by the sight of people who have no clean water to drink, in heat and humidity near 100, watching children’s toys and bodies float by in toxic soup, perhaps those of a parent or child or husband or wife, and maybe reflecting their own near term future. Yesterday, there was an entire parish that hadn’t been heard from at all: that was the thing, if there was one single thing that made me look at the scale of this disaster.

Yet, as comes up every time we have tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes, we continue to live and build in areas of the earth prone to natural disaster. But I guess there is no safe physical place. So why let the risk get in the way of living and building? Maybe it’s mass madness to build again where it was all swept away last week, but we wouldn’t be alive otherwise.

I’m thinking of areas in our lives in which we live and build things that are as necessary as they are, necessarily, temporary. The life spans of our pets is usually less than our own, for instance, yet we adopt them and love them. Losing them can take a long, long time to get over. I still feel like crying when I drive by the spot my kitty, Gizzy, (short for Gizmo), was hit by a car over five years ago. Sometimes relationships have life spans less than our own, too. More often than not! Yet we are so engaged in them and fall apart so thoroughly when they do.

What in your life has been physically temporary, yet necessary? Tell it in a Drabble. Here are the guidelines again. Send it to: drabble@wvu.org. In short, a Drabble is 100 words exactly, not including the title, and is due within 10 days of the day the mailer for this ezine is emailed to subscribers.

See you next time.


About the Author
Hello, and welcome to Drabbles. I'm Michelle, your Drabbles editor. I live south of San Francisco, with four spoiled cats, near the sea where I love to walk every day. I've tutored English in workshops, classrooms, and individually at San Jose State University, and have worked on the Fiction Panel here at Writers' Village. Comments and questions are always welcome!