It perches in the soul

Have you ever had a totally visceral response to something? Pure amygdala? One moment you're minding your own business, then the next moment -WHAM- you're responding to something before you even know what hit you.
Just by chance, one evening last week I walked past two things that gave me the -WHAM-, but  at completely different ends of the spectrum.

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There's a long-term rehab facility/nursing home about halfway between my apartment and the grocery store. It's a low-lying concrete building on the north side of the street, with a design clearly inspired by Soviet block countries during the Cold War. Apathy seeps from its frigid, dead walls. I usually avoid looking at it but on this particular walk I glanced up, and when I did I saw two of its inmates facing toward me.
Blank stares through bald windows, with slacked jaws and glassy eyes, like something strange and shriveled that doesn't recognize itself anymore. As though they themselves aren't sure if they're still people. It hurts to see them, it hurts to think about them, and then it hurts to feel guilty for hurting. It's the same feeling that comes slowly creeping in when I watch my mom walking with her twisting hemiplegic body, or when I pass the ICU waiting room and a cluster of people are melted into each other sobbing, except the feeling is delivered all in one jolt just by looking at that nursing home. 

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There's a memorial fountain on the hospital campus. It was built in memory of a woman who lost her brave battle against cancer, designed with a smooth mirrored water surface and floating lily pads surrounding a landing that's inlaid with lights that twinkle in the pattern of the stars that were in the sky the night the woman was born.

In May, there was a pair of ducks in the memorial fountain. In June, there were none. Then when I walked by last week, there were six ducklings swimming and bobbing around all over that fountain with reckless abandon.

WHAM. Pure dumb joy. Like a dog chasing a tennis ball or Harry Carey limbering up for the 7th inning sing-along or the kid at the top of the rollercoaster with a giddy laugh caught in her throat. It is wonderful.

And appropriately enough, the fountain is edged with this poem:

 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

 

And sweetest in the Gale is heard.

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm.

 

I’ve heard it in the chillest land

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

           

- Emily Dickinson