little girl waiting with her dad to watch the train go by, running through the leaves over and over again just to make them rustle.
there is no app for that
I would capture and preserve this particular combination of sunlight and breeze.
menopause sucks
No one ever told me how much. It’s the hot flashes mainly– an innocuous term for the sudden conflagrations, wild tempests of heat and drenching sweat, followed by all over clamminess and chill.
But it’s also the end of fertility that it signals, the final nail in the coffin of childbearing possibility. Because even now, even substantially years after the conclusive fertility clinic failure, I still retained the tiniest spark of hope. And now. This red-faced scalding insult to injury.
crunching
…over fallen acorns, dusky brrrrr of cicadas from above, goldenrod waving in the wind.
I begrudge
…people with strollers, pregnant women their glow. Living by the playground, walking the dog, there are many.
sometimes
…it feels I’ve spent my quota of giddy laughter.
naked
Denuding the Christmas tree is less nice than dressing it up in sparkles and bows.
Being emotionally naked makes those who are more cloaked uncomfortable.
The nude Christmas tree looms sprucely, and the writer lurches with a green pang.
bones
I have a box of bird bones and feathers, tiny blue egg shell, dead butterflies, dried tea roses.
There are piles of wishbones and three or four bird skulls with different beak shapes, deep hollow eye sockets.
I think I started collecting these things to use in assemblages. Gorgeous dragonflies and cicadas. Beautiful beetles. Then feathers and the odd hatched or fallen egg.
The first skull came from a birdhouse in my yard. I found it long after the bird got its head stuck somehow and died, half in, half out of the entrance hole.
The wishbones accumulated from many chicken dinners. A hoard of unspent wishes.
itis
What ails me? Anon. And.
I diagnose: at 40 I fretted; at the bend into 48 I’m nigh unrecognizable. Grown fat and slow with middle age. Chris shot a video at some odd moment of me washing dishes. I came across it on my phone and thought, Who is that woman?Â
If only to write as of yore, sans excruciating restraint and parsing. I’d like to say, and know, just what I mean. Like that.
There is of course nostalgia, o, folly. The sheer volume of things and people I miss weights me, clots mental teeth. Perhaps most poignantly those which do not deserve the missing. I crave what’s past with tenacious melancholy. No roses while lived but rouged by distance.
Just so, this time, one day, will feel different, stripped of pain and retouched with the tinge of retrospect. I thrust myself forward in a concise act of imagination to that distant moment to feel it differently, and almost can for a moment. Just a glimpse of forecast hindsight.
It relieves uncomfortable stretches of the insistent present, in which it’s hard to sit still, hard to stand. Aches abloom in joints that worked fine previously. Oil can, squeaks the imagination.
That woman at the sink, remember her? A balloon she may be, yet not altogether untethered. Tugging in the wind.
sunday
The round tone of bells spilled across crop lines and fanned out over a low rise toward town. The spire of the One True Presbyterian Church nudged low-hanging cloud banks, and late parishioners slipped in across the granite stoop. Double doors folded closed as a final knell floated down and away. Chester sat crammed into the pew between Doris and Mother, each having claimed an arm to ensure his sinner’s pelt arrived on time and in place to sop up Pastor’s weekly catechism. Chester cast his glance over the backs of heads and well-dressed shoulders– the good folk of Host Town, scrubbed of workday grime and come to rouse the spirit with hymn. Chester thought with longing of his pipe back home in the workroom and sighed, shifting to find a more comfortable position on the hard wooden bench. Mother’s scowl pronounced disapproval on the periphery, and Chester sighed again.