Cyanide, Socialism and Freedom

           Photo by Danilo Alvesd on Unsplash

Mom kept a vial of cyanide in her jewelry box. Perhaps it was a powerful reminder of her family’s escape from Latvia. Or she just wasn’t sure what to do with it. Its original purpose was clear; if bartering border crossings with soap and cigarettes went terribly awry---swallow the pill.

As a kid I didn’t understand the backstory. Pieces I never learned. My grandfather, Augusts Mitrevics, his wife Lidija and two children fled the Latvia they knew seeing the Latvia it would become. He was a famous theatre actor. Even has a page on IMDB. 

They erased him. A visitor to Latvia up to 1991 would find no record of my Grandfather. Though he appeared on postcards. Though he was a leading actor. He turned down their offer of summers in Siberia (and springs, and winters…) for the freedom of another country. For that he was shunned.

It’s hard to live with a boot in your neck and a gun in your back. They said that in Latvia, in 1978, as the freedom movement bubbled. When you don’t have freedom, you appreciate it. When its the air you breathe, you take it for granted.

I am next in line in a chain that escaped cyanide and socialism. Seeing life and liberty taken and given away jars me. Governors barring people from working to meet their needs is morally wrong. To tell people where they can go (shop, drive, celebrate) puts people in chains un-American. Yes, one says, ‘but these are only little links for your own good.’ No matter the size of the chain it’s still bondage.

The poison was a reminder. Pilgrimage to a new land. An imperfect place not fully home. A free country. Mom would have fought to keep it that way; grandparents too. The path forward is clear. Don’t swallow the pill. 

Hard Seasons and A Hidden Hand

                                                    Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

“So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten,
the crawling locust, the consuming locust, and the chewing locust…”

 Driven from my home I drive round it in circles. Threatened with a TRO (temporary restraining order) I am forced to leave. Numb and confused I call a friend for advice. Checking into a cheap hotel that boasts a pool---a plot of dirt, avoiding the hotel boasting rooms by the hour. “How long will you be with us?” Hotel to hotel, one night grows to three weeks. 

Our life calendars are marked by cataclysmic crisis; pre-Covid, after the divorce, before the baby, during the cancer.  Life is lived segment by segment, season into season; childhood, college, that first job, first love, that fast (impractical for a family) car.

Memory is achromatic. Seeing experience as only black. Perceiving periods as pitch-dark. Not seeing ‘the strong hand of love hidden in the shadows.” That period was less a punch to the gut than it was a hollowness of the gut; feeling numb—which is no feeling at all.

 It was the zenith of the locust plague. Devastation cleared the ground for restoration. The locusts destroy what you’ve built with heart and hand. They overwhelm so you see no way out; only dark, only wing and leg. 

From the detritus of crystalline wings springs new life. A new season. Grasshoppers gnawed the first marriage to the root. A season of singleness and necessary soul work. Separation from the daughter burst into rich relationship that continues into her adulthood. New friendships and enriched older ones. Then the greatest surprise; the friend that is my wife ten years into these healing years.

God’s heart for us is that we are not depressed and distressed by the swarm. Life isn’t always driving circles in the dark. The grasshoppers will move on. The air will clear. Soul and seeds survive. In the light we will see what the strong hand of love was working in the shadows.