Continued from home page…

In this current phase, of garden preparedness, we are readying the plants for the elements. According to some guy on YouTube, the seedlings can’t go immediately from their cozy closet sauna to the unpredictable Michigan “spring.” This would be shocking (quite literally!) and potentially devastating to their young vegetable spines. The baby tomatoes need time to toughen; to grow more resilient and used to the wind, sun, and daily variations in temperature. So we give them an hour outside, then two, gradually increasing until my husband feels certain they can handle a Michigan May, which, nine months into his intern year, he is horrified to find includes snow. 

After he takes the seedlings outside, he puts on his scrubs, pager, his ID, which everyday returns with a new sticker dot confirming he is fever free, and gathers up his plastic bag with face mask and shield. He reminds me again, not to forget the plants, and then he drives away, to a hospital that is far different than the one I left, as a med student, several months ago with patients far different than those he imagined caring for during his family medicine residency. 

We didn’t ask for a theme when we asked for submissions for this first issue. To be honest, because this is a space for wild, abundant and maybe unflattering honesty, we were pretty delighted that y’all even showed up.

But what became clear as we experienced these gorgeous writings and works of art, was that a common thread ran through them. These are stories from young professionals who know what it is to travel through a hard time, express it eloquently, and come out stronger. 

We were humbled by the submissions we received from across the country, and the world. These are the ten that we returned to; the voices that spoke not just of struggle but of perseverance. The stories that spoke of big human hurts but came away a greater desire to help, to soothe, to carry on. Our first issue of Auxocardia gives, we feel, an ultimate message of hope. 

For you, we hold up the beet sprouts that are learning to withstand the wind. (Too much? Do you guys mind that I compared you to a beet sprout?)

In short, in a word;

Resilience. 

It’s May of a difficult spring.

None of us has gone untouched by what has transpired in the last few months; Anna Delamerced makes this clear in her stunning poem, Dispatches.  Like Ramesha Ali and Ellie Lorenzana, we have all confronted the humanity and inhumanity of this moment and our training, as Ali explains in A Fragile Balance and Lorenzana does in her untitled poem. Whether it's the story of understanding a patient’s diagnosis, as Jay Wong does in Looking Up and Gavisha Waidyaratne explores in her narratives through blood smears, or understanding the patient themselves, as Eesha Dave does in her Found in Translation, we are reminded of struggle, but also of growth.

Persistence and survival is present in the ever resilient form of the human woman depicted in the phenomenal Kelsey Carman’s art, while Rianna Starheim and Ruth Bishop reassure us that, no matter how challenging the road before us, we walk it together.

Yes. It has been a difficult May, in a difficult spring. I think we all know, some of us intimately and personally, that there are still hard moments to come. But I hope that you will take solace, as I do, in Paulina Devlin’s art, which may remind us that there is still a chance for this year to be one of plenty.

It seems like a small thing, at the end of the long day, for my husband to come home, and see the plants in the closet, warm again after their sojourn outside. I wonder sometimes if this apartment, with its stir-crazy med student (me), puppy and closet of plants, is enough of an island for him to return to, in this ocean of uncertainty. 

But when he comes home, after he standing outside the door, wiping ID, pager, cell phone, backpack with alcohol wipes, placing clothes in a paper bag, and showering (as I follow in his wake, spraying surfaces he has touched with disinfectant), he goes to the closet and smiles on the spinach, the little lettuce, the broccoli growing out of the soil. 

“They’re getting stronger,” he says, and his face lights up, and I feel, momentarily, like maybe I don’t have to worry about him, as much as I do.  

He’s resilient.

So are all of you.

-with much love and gratitude,

Molly