SHELTER
- jenminotti
- Sep 18
- 3 min read
By Evelyn Asher
PROMPT—Peace ...
Relentless. Senseless. Tragic. Man’s Inhumanity Against Man.
The Guardian’s headline near the bottom of the digital front page read, ‘It’s blitz, blitz, blitz. Kiev’s shelters fill up as Russia intensifies aerial attacks.’ “With each fresh onslaught Russia exceeds its own grim tally. In June 2024 it fired 580 rockets and drones at Ukraine; in June 2025 it was 5,209. Civilian casualties are at a three-year high.”
My conversation partner in Obukhiv, Ukraine, 28 miles from Kyiv, and I developed an immediate connection in February 2025. Although separated by 5,746 miles, I feel a strong link to my ancestors who fled Kiev during the late 1800s’pogroms.
From my shelter from escalating authoritarianism, I crafted an email to Caterina (name change to protect her safety). Caterina is on vacation from a highly visible position in a manufacturing plant. She admitted that position would not have been hers if it were not wartime. Because of the onslaught of drones and their restricted travel, I sent videos of Italy and Germany to distract her and her husband and keep their dreams alive.
Caterina continues to teach me about resilience. Her shelters have known times of great poverty, illness that cost her friendships, disdain from her stepfather, and the deep loss of her mother from a car accident. The memory of her mother’s death quelched Caterina’s desire to drive. She loves her village where she can walk to work, to her in-laws, to her daughter’s (26), to the thrift store that has book selections, and in her small forest where she loves to walk with her husband. Their walk on Sunday during her vacation wove into a three-hour holiday.
Russia’s aggression on Ukraine is the largest and deadliest war in Europe since WWII. At the beginning of the war, there were lights out in the early evening in their village to avoid detection by bombers. Her only view is from the balcony that is inaccessible during the winter months.
On screen, Caterina is radiant! I smiled this week when I told her I harvested my row of heirloom and cherry tomatoes from which I make my caprese salads that mirrored hers!
Caterina is satisfied. She loves to play virtual reality games with her husband, daughter and her boyfriend. Her wants are minimal. Although travel is curtailed, she is not without dreams. Her sterile wall-papered space reflects her minimal desires. She has created a shelter of life-long learning, an appreciation of arts and of the universe without the American yearning of possession.
When I lift my eyes, my sanctuary with its Marshall’s Buddha greets me. I pause to shift the energy moving an eleven-million-year-old Sandia quartz that beams endurance to the front.
A glance at the lower shelf of my bookcase yields a navy tambourine that I often reach for during a sabbath service streamed from mid-Manhattan. A rabbi or cantor accompanied by a quartet sings while the processional is conducted after the torah is removed from the sacred arc. I recall a Sisterhood gathering in Foscoe, NC when our hostess told us a story about Miriam packing her tambourine when she was sent out in the desert knowing there is always something to look forward to.
Caterina and I count the blessings of our shelters, hers on the seventh floor, four flats on each floor – mine on the third floor, 20 apartments on each floor.
Both our freedoms are threatened.
For now, we have choices, and self- and government-inflicted restrictions.
Under clouds of air raids or rhetoric we have a choice to celebrate or despair.
Next Tuesday Caterina and I will resume our questioning to increase her vocabulary. Answers to questions from her chosen Green Forest platform and mine culled from curiosity decorating our shelters, reveal family history, and strength that wrap me in joy.
With a friend there is no such place as far away.
Vulnerability is the only true elegance.
Evelyn Asher lives in Gainesville, GA where she loves to write and sketch on the shore of the Chattahoochee River. Her poetry reflects her compassionate nature, envisions lives of people walking down crowded thoroughfares or reveling in sacred environments. What She Carries, her second poetry collection of sharp perceptions, brings sight, sighs, and beauty to the unseen.