Minnesota Moms
Living in Occupied Saint Paul
I am having a hard time writing this down. How do you describe what you are living through while you are still living through it? I cannot yet order these squares to quilt an image, or write a story. Right now they’re just fragments and snapshots and little sharp sounds. So I will just hand these pieces to you, for now, and you can put them together with your own. And one day we will write this together and it will tell us who we were and who we are.
It’s dark outside and it’s hard to read the license plates on the cars whizzing by; it’s so much easier in the daytime. My wool socks start to itch and my coat feels too heavy as the car warms up but I need to keep them on in case we have to jump out quickly. Our eyes are focused on every car driving by, silently and sometimes out loud, naming what we see and asking each other if it’s ICE. Was that a California plate? Did you see that sticker? Is this one we saw earlier? That one is just idling, sitting next to that other dark SUV…
