the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

76 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance:
newspaper over my head, making a tent for me to breathe the medicine water
boiling in the brown cake pan. At two I had asthma, called croup then. I felt
their concern for me, but under that sensed the uncertainties between them.
In my wheezing lungs, tense and troubled, I knew their discontent, their
grief. It was the newspaper that was telling, a curt, crisp reality, not a soft,
enfolding towel.
Babies in the early months are lively in sensing their world with their
whole bodies, collecting a multitude of information not yet encoded in words.
Before a verbal mind develops, there is a sensing body.
My observing was not sweet and light in my early years. Not easily
verbal, my sensory mind still held understanding of some non-verbal essence
of what I experienced. I made my own sensory sense of my father and mother’s
worlds that held a core of me together. Then later it became a pleasure in my
world to observe the immense variety in motion around me, the light and the
dark, the sensory interplay.
Now with the constant struggle to find and cobble together words, the
sensory and the non-verbal world around me is refreshing and intriguing—
first sensing the house, and now the crow that flies over from his perch to sit
on the peak of my garage. I observe him while drinking my morning coffee on
my back porch. He doesn’t just randomly fly in and out. He seems deliberate
in his coming and his presence feels companionable. No words needed. His
mate sits quietly on another roof at the edge of the yard, watching us. I watch
his comings and goings, his activities tending her, flying back and forth to
the huge crow families living noisily in nearby fir trees.
I find a flat stone one morning and place it near the bowl of water plants
by the upper concrete terrace. It makes a place to leave pieces of bread for him.
The first day he takes one piece, flies off with it down the alley, and doesn’t
come back. After a week he takes two, carefully holding both of them at once
in his beak, the second one, I think, for his mate. Still he doesn’t return for
more. This is striking to me because crows are unabashed and gluttonous
food gatherers. He makes taking the bread from me a more delicate act. It
feels like a communion rather than a meal.