“We can find glinting silver linings hiding all around, so pluck them out of the ordinary and save them from obscurity.”
In this brief time on earth, we can choose many things, including to believe in the goodness rooted deep in most people. We can choose grace and mercy and can expect to find pinpricks of light within every blanket of darkness. We dream and do and carry on through it all. Here we are.
“A melon breaking to share the sweet fruit inside. A serious face breaking into a smile. We break ... and yearn ... and find.”
– Sonnet Walters
While pregnant, there are days when I am ravenous. I awake hungry and never seem to fill. I grow shaky before lunch and can’t suppress the need for a snack before bed. I run a hand along the curve of my belly, where my baby is growing steadily. My body is a vessel, and I am less in control of it than ever before. I cannot know why there are days my body demands more food, or feels sick, or leaves me exhausted. I can only trust the signals it sends me for rest or nourishment, understanding that miraculously, though I have no conscious part in it, my body is developing and sustaining a human being.
I don’t know why your mood can shift like a cloud
why you’re unhappy after breakfast
not wanting to stand on your new step stool and brush your teeth
You’re twenty months and ten days old, my son
and you cannot tell me what pushes sundry feelings to the surface
and you may not even know yourself
For several years (too long in the rearview mirror of life) I worked for a woman who prided herself on saying whatever she was thinking without apology. We were working at our desks in our small office one day when she made a pointed observation.
“You roll your r’s sometimes. Thrrrree!!” she chirped with a laugh like a short bark. “I’m going to call you Little Hispanic Girl.”
“I am Hispanic,” I replied, uncomfortable with the expression of self-satisfied amusement she wore.
Hair mussed
Sleep still slipping
from the corners of my eyes
Coffee piping
Rain chilly, pattering on the tin roof
of the first home which is fully ours.
The autumn afternoon was sunny and crisp. I was playing outside with my one and a half year old son, Ocean, when we heard the hum of an engine overhead.
“Look! It’s a biplane,” I told him, crouching down and pointing to the speck of aircraft skimming through the sky. By accident one day while driving down an unfamiliar road, I’d discovered a small airport on a hill just a few miles from our house. Ever since, I’d taken special note of the single-engine planes which would often buzz overhead, criss-crossing the sky as though sending me a message. Watching with my son, my heart twisted with an old ache.
“Self Storage” read the sign
(a little worn with time, like the best of us).
An intriguing idea, so
I pulled into the parking lot,
meandering inside.
Throughout my day, so often it becomes part of the normal rhythm of motherhood, it’s easy to be prodded by small worries about my young son, Ocean.
“Has he eaten enough? Is he hot or cold? On track developmentally? Sleeping enough? Well-stimulated?”
Many of these worries are vital to his care and are easily remedied or assured. Yet there will always be times I worry in vain. I imagine the worst, only to be surprised by the best.
Most mornings, I put my toddler, Ocean, into the jogging stroller and take him for a walk or run. Normally a bundle of rambunctious energy, on our walks Ocean enjoys just looking around and taking in the morning air, often with one foot popped up on the front railing.
Rain folded the frozen earth in her arms, said
“Let me embrace you awhile. Let us transform.”
A world hard as geode, scintillating.
Glassy overcoats of ice for all the trees
Lovely changelings, till the branches, with dismay,
Succumbed: the new weight pulling, cracking, crashing.