Note: This was written nearly a year ago, shortly after the Sandy Hook school massacre. It’s been a year, but those families and others still feel the loss.—

The lights are strung.

The bells are ringing.

The presents – most of them – are wrapped.

Joy brings smiles and laughter, love and caring.

Then – 11 days before Christmas – the season ends.

A bitter, sad, embattled man uses a gun to bring others down.

At the end, 20 little kids and 6 adults became angels.

Christmas – the season – has ended.

Or has it?

Those angels were greeted by Jesus.

He hugged them and consoled them.

He promised he would be there for the families left behind.

He would wipe their tears and reassure them that their loved ones are safe.

Those families will cry on Christmas, but the Babe will be with them.

That tiny infant, who once lay in a manager, will remind them of the

Hope he gives to them and to the angels newly received in Heaven.

— Jenny Munro

Can you believe it? She knows them all.

All of what, you ask.

All of her school teachers, I reply.

Me – I remember the most important ones.

But not my mother – she remembers them all.

And she reels off the names.

They flow with little hesitation from her brain and mouth:

Hattie Earl and Tessie Stanton and Rita Galloway.

Then came Gladys Lucas and Mrs. Edwards and Mrs. Bethea.

They were followed by Ethel Lee.

By the time she reached high school, she talks about one teacher –

Elizabeth Covington, whom she adored,

Miss Covington  taught Latin and life lessons with equal abandon.

And she taught my mother to love education and respect

Those who taught it to others.

Eventually she followed in their footsteps, teaching students

Who still remember her name and lessons.

— Jenny Munro

“No! No! No!”

The voice sliced through her head –

A scream from a woman

Hearing her husband was dead.

She couldn’t go to the woman or help her

Because she was trying to absorb her own news

Her husband also lay dead – and he was the driver.

Tommy, that vital, fun-loving man, lived no more.

She took the news stoically,

Hiding her tears as a secret.

She was alone.

Friends gathered to support her –

Clean the house, cook food, call the children, help make arrangements.

Nobody could really help. It was so final.

Her husband was dead. Twenty-six years of marriage lay cold and still.

She was alone.

No – that wasn’t true.

She still had her children, a son and a daughter.

They arrived home and did their best to support her.

Their need for an anchor gave her life a new balance.

She got on with living. She cried, mostly alone.

She grieved. Her mind roared with anger, diving to the depths of despair.

Tommy was so young and he had so much to live for.

But she cared for her elderly mother, gaining purpose in life.

She taught, continuing to mold young minds.

The laughter came back. Tommy was still part of her life.

He lived through her thoughts and in family stories and pictures.

Grace was strong and not really alone.  Life was different, but it could be good.

She survived.

The windows glow as the sun streams through.

The soft beauty of lapis lazuli, aventurine, emerald and amber

Sets my soul at peace.

Arches and diamonds adorn the stained glass windows

That send their colors across my mind,

Easing my fears and worries.

I look from the windows to the simple cross and the glowing candles

And know that I am home.

–Jenny Munro

By Nan Lundeen

The power’s in the details whether you’re writing poetry or prose.

Carolyn Miller describes women who wore white wool sorority blazers and “white bucks with white crew socks rolled down once” in her essay, “Arts and Science,” published in The Missouri Review.

Miller gives us one enormously telling detail—that the sock was rolled down once. She manages to paint an entire milieu with that one detail. Woe to the sorority girl who rolled down her socks twice at the University of Missouri in 1959.

In her poem “Eggs,” Sharon Olds describes her daughter cracking shells, sliding three yolks into the bowl, “slit them with the whisk, beat them till they hissed.”

The power of Olds’s “Eggs” lies in the sound, hissed. The reader understands that those eggs were being thoroughly beaten!

Charles Dickens regales us with his usual brilliance as he describes a moment during Scrooge’s tour of London with the Ghost of Christmas Present. Here are food descriptions: “great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts,” and “ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions.”

Reading Dickens is like smelling and tasting Victorian London.

Eudora Welty begins her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, with a memory of the house in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was born in 1909. “We grew up to the striking of clocks,” she wrote. She describes a “mission-style oak grandfather clock” that stood in the hall and “sent its gong-like strokes” throughout the house even to the sleeping porch where “midnight could wake us up.”

Welty’s striking clocks place you in her childhood home.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk juxtaposes details of the mundane with a dramatic moment in his novel, Snow. An exiled poet traveling as a journalist visits the town of Kars, Turkey. He is researching suicides of girls forbidden to wear head scarves and describes how a sixteen-year-old girl had eaten an evening meal with her family. She cleared the table with her sisters, “giggling and tussling,” and went to get dessert. She then went into her parent’s bedroom and “shot herself with a hunting rifle.”

Pamuk’s matter-of-fact details contrasting with the suicide not only places the reader in the scene, but feeds our curiosity just as it feeds the exiled poet’s. The scene is powerful.

Sandra Redding describes the death of a husband in her story, “Tin of Tube Rose.” A couple are sitting in their living room watching “Charlie’s Angels” when “an empty can of Budweiser came rolling right over to my foot.” When the narrator looks over at her husband Ed in his recliner, she sees him “slumped down just like all the air had been let out.”

I’m not sure what to make of Redding’s rolling beer can, perhaps like Pamuk’s writing, the juxtaposition of the mundane with the dramatic creates a memorable image. Her simile “like all the air gone out of it,” is so apt it hurts.

Have fun choosing potent details for your writing!

Nan Lundeen

The author is grateful to the SCWW’s Quill for first publishing this column.