Tag: pandemic
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What God Does with Dust
It layered itself like a fuzzy film along baseboards I didn’t often clean. It gathered on books I hadn’t opened in years. Dust marked what I liked to forget. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the clergy would recite on Ash Wednesday in the church of my childhood. I remember…
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Anything But Gone: On An Advent with Grief
“Who was it?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if I ever knew.” A ceramic Christmas tree sat on my bookshelf. I’d just switched it on, and its multi-colored lights glowed. That little tree had been part of Christmastime as far back into my childhood as I could remember. It wasn’t…
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Claiming a Fast in Pandemic Time: On How We Carry What We Miss
Before the pandemic, the scent of warm, yeasty bread would have filled the chapel. Someone from our school’s café would have walked down in the hour or so before the service to leave a fresh-baked loaf wrapped in a white towel on the table. We’d have smelled it through all the prayers, music, and spoken…
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On the Changing of Seasons
Lately, I’ve been fighting it. Pandemic life has meant so much change already. I’m feeing less and less desire to adapt. I’m feeling strongly protective of things I wouldn’t have expected to hold onto so tightly. As summer passes and days shorten, I find myself feeling inordinate amounts of grief about small things like the…
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Handling the Holes Created by Loss
I’ve never worked in kintsugi gold, but I’ve begun enjoying the other kinds of repairs that I do manage to do. Repairs feel like a form of care for the things that go with me through my days. On the bookshelf, a Joy of Cooking cookbook I inherited from my grandmother has its cracked spine reinforced with…
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Beneath the Loss
Does the vividness of memory ever surprise you? It does me. I remember a day as a student when I joined some classmates in waving scarves of every color as we danced barefoot down the grey, marble-floored hallways of our seminary. A drummer walked with us, and a group of people followed. I think it…
About the author
Callie J. Smith writes about women who, like her, are finding themselves. Her stories and essays explore everyday things like hope, creativity, and grief.
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Callie J. Smith 