Do You Have An Apple?

Give it to Ukraine.

Ihave two apples on my kitchen counter. They waited for me to cut them into my salad as I watched the war news tonight.

I did squats and some weights as newsreels rolled through the devastation in Ukraine. Mariupol is rubble; the Russians are retreating from Chernobyl, perhaps to regroup, perhaps because their troops have radiation sickness because no one told them the trenches they dug were radioactive from the explosion in 1986.

What explosion, they said?

Or did they?

Speculation on the veracity of the story went back and forth between the experts as they switched to a film of a starving man being carried out from a bombed-out building on a stretcher.

He clutched his shoes to his chest and begged for an apple.

“When was the last time you had something to eat?” the journalist asked.

“Three days ago,” the man replied.

The camera followed the length of his gaunt body from his stubble to his bare feet. I broke my resolution and looked away.

I’d made a pledge at the beginning of Putin’s war in Ukraine that I would watch the news, all the horror and wretched destruction, but that man’s feet almost broke me.

I can do nothing about the crimes against humanity that Putin is committing against Ukraine except witness it.

Some people have said they are done with the war news. I don’t believe they are heartless, but every story has a sell-by date. And Ukraine is six thousand miles away from some of us. Seeing the same shell-shocked faces and leveled cities day after day can numb us.

It’s Thursday night here. Baseball season is about to start. New shows are coming up on Netflix. The Paris shows blah, blah, blah. Life goes on. Don’t tell me you’re still talking about Will Smith?

I post about Ukrainian knitting designers and urge readers to send money to their digital accounts. Not an original idea, I’m glad to find out I’m joining a growing trend to support individuals as well as the big aid organizations.

But the other thing I do is witness the terrible face of war in Ukraine every day. I make myself look at it so I don’t harden myself to the suffering those people endure every hour of every day.

I remind myself they are the sacrificial lambs who are losing their homes, their loved ones, their lives for me.

Putin is turning Ukraine into a wasteland because he knows the Western powers will not come after him. We will not storm the Kremlin as any sane opponent would because he holds the trump card: his nuclear arsenal.

So even though he has a hapless army making a mockery of modern warfare, even though he’s using medieval tactics to lay seige to Ukraine, it is his to destroy.

I sleep safely in my bed because we can’t take the chance that Vlad is the madman we think he is, and he’ll turn those horrendous weapons on us all.

At the end of the news, I walked into my kitchen. Sometimes the news makes me angry and motivated. I’ll open my computer and search for the next knitting pattern to post.

Other times, I’ll do an internet search to get a more in-depth take on the analysis delivered by the experts.

Tonight I opened my refrigerator to start my dinner and lined up my salad ingredients on the counter, heavyhearted but hungry nevertheless.

It was when I reached for the apple I use to sweeten my greens that it hit me tonight. The bombed out towns, the Russian soldiers sent unaware into Chernobyl’s deadly forest, and the victim of the war rescued in Mariupol, his battered feet and gaunt face, begging for an apple. Would he ever walk again? Would he even survive?

This war is becoming increasingly personal, even though I don’t actually know anyone involved.

I think of John Donne. Yes, of course, for whom the bell tolls. But tonight, poetry is no comfort. I just wish I could give that man one of my apples.

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