Autistics Speaking Day 2016: Love's Austere and Lonely Offices

Dani Alexis writes "Autistics Speaking Day 2016:  Love's Austere and Lonely Offices" at Autistic Academic.

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

Speaking indifferently to him, 

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

– “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden

I woke up at 4:45 a.m. to the sound of my cat having what is either an epileptic seizure or a transient ischemic attack, and ever since then, I have had no intention of writing for Autistics Speaking Day today.  My day seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the annual festival of Autistic people speaking for ourselves, a festival founded in direct response to the theories and rhetoric that insist that to be unable to speak for oneself is autism.

 

But then.  I’m autistic; this is my day; why not speak?  Sufficient unto each day is the relevance thereof, and all that.

 

Read the rest here!