After the killings in Parkland, Florida, Maria took a heavy metal pellet gun out of our kitchen drawer – it was in the house when we moved in, we have never used it. She had, as many of us did, powerful feelings about the guns and about the children who died, and she unraveled a baby blanket and crocheted  the gun, and attached them with a thread.

She created this 4 x 6 postcard and put it up for sale today. A portion of the proceeds will go to support the students in Parkland, Florida.

I thought the cord was meant to suggest an umbilical cord, she said it was meant to connect the gun with gun violence that takes 30,000 lives a year in America, and in any other context, would urgently, if not desperately,  dominate the national political discussion.

We are a broken country if we can’t do something about this. This is one step.

It was, I think, her way of supporting the amazing students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, many of them now  victims again, of death threats and conspiracy theorists and trolls, all the new thugs in American life.

They are showing us how be moral and strong. What are we and who are we if we cannot come together and protect our children?

Maria said her hands can sometimes express her feelings better than her head. The context her is strong, guns and very innocent children, horrifically tied together.  The notecards are $12 for a pack of $8. She wanted to price them cheaply so that people, especially young people, could afford to buy them.

They are for sale only on her new Etsy shop. You can read about them on her blog. As I mentioned above, a portion of the proceeds from the postcard sales will go to the student survivors in Parkland and their crusade for common sense gun control.

She can speak for herself, and does on the site, but her wish is for these cards to circulate among people who have long ago run out of words and despaired of argument. You can see them here.