All My Puny Sorrows

All My Puny Sorrows is the phrase at the heart of Elfrieda Von Riesen’s signature mark, a design she takes from a poem by Samuel Coleridge and paints around East Village. The expression joins a public act of self-inscription to a private language of sisterhood: years later, Yolandi Von Riesen finds the poem among her mother’s books and recognizes the source of the mark. In that return, a youthful emblem of visibility acquires the poem’s more intimate meanings of confidences, sorrow, and a sister’s absence.

From a phrase to a signature

After the family moves into a new house, Elfrieda begins trying to increase her visibility. Her inspiration is the ochre pictographs on rock, whose endurance and mixed message of hope, reverence, defiance, and aloneness have caught her attention. She decides that she, too, will make a mark. On a yellow legal notepad she shows Yolandi a design built from the initials E.V.R., for Elfrieda Von Riesen, and A.M.P., with a large S that covers, underlines, and dissects the other letters. The S stands for Sorrows; the smaller initials are gathered inside it.

The construction makes the phrase both a name and a frame. Elfrieda’s own initials establish authorship, while the enclosing S gives the whole design its title and shape. The symbol does not simply spell out a slogan: it folds an expression of sorrow around the person who claims it. When Yolandi does not immediately understand the design, Elfrieda explains it and punctuates her idea by punching her right fist into her open left palm, a characteristic gesture she uses to mark her own inventions. The force of that gesture makes the mark feel less like decoration than a deliberate assertion of presence.

Public inscription and uneven endurance

Efrieda plans to paint the symbol on natural landmarks around East Village. The ambition links her private initials to the landscape and to the pictographs that first inspired her. Her chosen sign is meant to be seen outside the family home, on places that might seem to outlast an individual. It is an effort to become visible in a community whose habits and expectations form part of the setting in which the family lives.

The marks remain in East Village, but their survival is partial: red spray-painted AMPSs are still visible, fading with time, and fade faster than the hardy Aboriginal ochre pictographs. That contrast measures the distance between inspiration and imitation without erasing Elfrieda’s act. The pictographs have a durability her paint cannot match, yet the fading AMPSs remain evidence that she made her mark. The expression thus names sorrow while the physical inscriptions make a more outward claim: Elfrieda was there, and she chose how to signify herself.

The poem behind the initials

The source of the design becomes newly legible when Yolandi stays in her mother’s apartment and notices a small blue bookshelf beside her air mattress. Its crowded collection reflects her mother’s habit of carrying books everywhere: well-read mysteries sit beside books by people she knows, classics, and a volume of Coleridge’s poetry. Some of the larger mysteries have been cut into halves or thirds and held together with rubber bands so they are easier to carry. The practical, altered books place Coleridge among an intimate household collection rather than on a distant literary pedestal.

Yolandi takes down the poetry book and reads a passage in which the speaker remembers an only sister, describes pouring out puny sorrows and hidden troubles to her, and grieves on waking at midnight to find her absent. Yolandi recognizes that this is the poem from which Elfrieda took AMPS. The discovery gives the design a precise emotional origin: beneath the initials and emphatic S is a poem about a sister who was loved, trusted with private suffering, and mourned when she was not there. The title phrase is therefore not merely a name for a feeling. In the poem that supplies it, sorrow is bound to the relationship through which it can be told.

Recognition and a proposed future

The recognition arrives while Yolandi is sleeping imperfectly on the air mattress, somewhere between sleep, dreaming, and full consciousness. From that moment comes a plan: after Elfrieda is released from the hospital, Yolandi will invite her to Toronto to stay for a while. She imagines being there to bring her sister home, with room to walk, talk, rest, and spend time without pressure. Yolandi would be working, at least in some fashion, so Elfrieda would not be alone; Yolandi’s daughter Nora would also be there.

The plan includes examining the Zurich option at length. Yolandi thinks leaving from Toronto would be easier than leaving from Winnipeg and that they could keep the possibility private until a decision had been made. This is a proposal, not a confirmed journey or outcome. Its importance lies in the care it attempts to make possible: rather than treating the poem’s sorrow as an abstract emblem, Yolandi turns toward the sister whose absence the poem describes and imagines practical forms of company. The mark that began as Elfrieda’s effort to become visible becomes, through Yolandi’s recognition, a route back to attention between sisters.

Meaning across time

All My Puny Sorrows moves between public sign and private inheritance. In East Village, the initials and enclosing S give Elfrieda a self-authored image that can be placed on the landscape; later, the poem reveals the older language of sisterly trust and grief held inside that image. Yolandi’s act of finding the source makes recognition itself part of the expression’s meaning: a mark can persist after its paint fades, and a phrase can carry an intimate history that is not obvious from its letters alone.

The expression does not resolve the sisters’ circumstances or guarantee the future Yolandi imagines. Instead, it connects distinct moments: Elfrieda’s attempt to make herself visible, the survival and fading of her signs, Yolandi’s encounter with the poem in a family bookshelf, and her decision to offer her sister a place beside her. Its emotional force comes from that change of scale. A design made from initials becomes legible as a declaration shaped by a poem about sisterhood, and the rediscovered words prompt a concrete gesture of care.