I was gone for four days
and meanwhile the rabbit brush
in the yard have gone gold.
It’s like how my child
was just here on my lap
reading about Aslan
and Skippyjon Jones,
and now she’s across the country
reading Plato and Marcus Aurelius.
What is that scent in the air?
Complex and heavy,
both pungent and sweet,
the scent of how a season
seems to change in an instant,
when all along, the change
was here. Even now, I can
feel it on my bare arms,
the clean cold touch of winter.
It’s not even pretending to hide.
Posts Tagged ‘aging’
Even If I’d Rather Not Know It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, parenting, rabbit brush, seasons, time on September 12, 2026| 4 Comments »
One in the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, dahlia, garden on August 18, 2026| 4 Comments »
so soon the pink dahlia petals
begin to shrivel and dry,
and look at these hands
that cut away what is dead,
they, too, are dahlia
One Reflection
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, garden, mirror, reflection, sunflower on July 30, 2026| 2 Comments »
standing in the garden
I gaze into the first sunflower—
mirror with a golden frame
Spontaneous
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, memory, singing on July 27, 2026| 8 Comments »
Somewhere, Warren writes me in his letter,
somewhere right now the Lutherans
are singing “For the Beauty of the Earth,”
and though I am sitting on a plane as I read his words,
I am standing in the grand auditorium
with the other first sopranos in All State Choir
and our voices soar and build and rise
as the tenors and altos swell beneath us
and we weave a trill through the height
of a phrase, and my whole body has bloomed
into praise on that stage and I,
for the first time, am no longer singer
but song. Now, almost forty years later
all I have to do is trace that moment
with the softest fingers of memory and
I’m weeping in 10B, soggy with old ecstasy.
How is it such power was stored somewhere
in my cells, enough to take me from zero to puddle
in two seconds flat, and how much more
latent beauty is hiding inside this aging vessel
somewhere beneath old TV jingles and daily drivel
and heartbreaking news and yellowed layers of guilt
just waiting for me to touch it?
Instead of Lamenting Aging
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, transformation on May 3, 2026| 19 Comments »
Just let the world amaze you.
—Augusta Kantra
I want to know these brittling bones
and sleepless nights as transformation,
my life an expression of the fundamental power
that drives the universe to dramatically change—
as bud becomes bloom becomes fruit
becomes soil; as star dust becomes
protoplanetary disks becomes asteroids
become planets; as girl becomes woman becomes
slower till she’s silence. As dinosaurs become fossils
and dodos become story. All transforms.
With no end, the universe remakes itself out of itself
again and again and again. Looking in the mirror,
I see in these wrinkles the chaos of early Earth
barraged by space rocks, then a million years
of rain, rain, rain, that somehow evolved
into this world of earthworms, and aspen leaves,
the spiraling song of canyon wren,
silk worms, pianos, cardamom tea, age spots,
night sweats, gray hair, cellular senescence,
and I entirely belong to this wild miasma
that is ever becoming, each morning,
each wrinkle a kind of transcendence,
a path to a place I’ve never been.
The Reflection
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, language, mirror, reflection, tick on March 31, 2026| 6 Comments »
It was late evening. I was sitting on the couch, the purple one my husband made, when I felt the small tickle traveling from my forearm to my wrist. Not wearing my glasses, I held out my arm for my husband to look. “What is it?” I asked. “A tick,” he said, his voice flat, matter of fact. He pinched it in his fingers, then took it to the counter and crushed it with the bottom of a water glass. I had had a good day, listening to a woman speak about how she could still be compassionate toward her mother after years of abuse. I had gone to a dinner in honor of my husband for difficult work well done. I was proud of him and said kind and true things about how I had seen him grow. The skin where the tick had been continued to tickle. In fact, I felt the light prickle of tick legs walking on almost every part of my body. I had to take everything off. I stood in front of the mirror and saw what wasn’t there. No tick. Nor the body I once had. It was not easy to look. I asked my eyes to remember it is possible to say something compassionate, something matter of fact, something true.
But Not a Moment Sooner
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, laughter, self-acceptance on December 18, 2025| 4 Comments »
Eventually we learn to laugh when we drop
the glass and it shatters all over the floor,
finding laughter more fun than a shackle of curses.
We can wiggle our butt more when someone
says it looks big instead of trying to tuck it
tighter beneath our hips. Eventually we learn
there is no way to not be exactly ourselves.
What freedom then. We can listen to the sound
of our own voice without cringing. Can dance
in front of anyone. Can wake up grateful for our aging face
in the mirror. Can wear questions like exotic perfume
and see how they grow us. Eventually,
we can look at each other and say,
I’m so glad you are exactly who you are.
Snapdragons in Autumn
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, autumn, bloom, garden, snapdragon on November 3, 2025| 4 Comments »
They no longer bloom,
but the snapdragons bring
an extravagance of dark green
to the garden otherwise bare.
I almost missed this pleasure,
poised as I was to rip them
from the soil when frost took
all the flowers. But there
is something past bloom
in me that thrills now
to see them there, growing
for the sake of growing,
tall and fully leafed out. Grow
while you can, they seem to say.
Until it’s all over, don’t you
ever stop with your growing.
The Change
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, change, death, flowers, frost, garden on October 5, 2025| 14 Comments »
Overnight, the frost
took every pink zinnia
every creamy dahlia,
fading their colors to brown.
The nasturtiums have slumped
into dense wilted tangle.
The marigolds hold themselves tall
in a blackened and upright
surrender. For now,
the bright, fresh bouquets
I made yesterday are still
bright and fresh in their vases.
This beauty, we know, won’t stay.
The message is simple:
All that rises passes away.
I see it in these hands
that planted and watered
and weeded and picked—
my skin now wrinkled and thin
as frost-withered petals.
Here: the chance to witness
my own rising and passing.
How natural to age, to die.
The flowers in the vase will wilt.
With every day, so do I.
Such strange gift. First
the joy of putting the self
in service to making something
beautiful. Then, beyond joy,
the grace in learning to let it all go.
Multitudes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, hiking, self, time on September 7, 2025| 2 Comments »
Over twenty years ago I walked
this same trail to Hope Lake
and crossed the same creeks
and picked my way through
the same talus which is always
falling in the path. I gathered
ripe raspberries and stared
at the red peaks all around.
Who was I then? A stranger
with my same name. I don’t
blame her for not knowing
she was young. As we climb,
I hold her hand. We don’t
say anything, I don’t want
to scare her. And who is that,
waiting for us at the edge?
Some future version of me
I can’t quite make out, but
her arms are open. Her smile
says she were expecting us.
And though it’s about to rain,
we all slip out of our clothes
to slip into the deep blue lake.
Quick, I say to all my selves,
and as one, we enter in.
Long after we leave the lake,
inside me, they continue to swim.
Letter to Myself at Twenty-One
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, body on June 5, 2025| 18 Comments »
What is it that shines through all this withering?
—Kim Rosen, “Grand Finale”
You would be embarrassed of my body.
You would never believe contentment
is possible with a belly this soft
and legs this thick, but sweetheart,
I promise you I love being alive
in this time-ripened body that still
carries me into the garden to plant
snap peas, this body that cradles
my grown girls, that explores
the familiar terrain of my husband,
that walks through spruce forests and thrills
at the scent of evergreen and rain.
It is so much easier now to be gentle
with myself, even easy to be gentle with you.
Easy to forgive you for thinking you needed
to starve these bones. The irony is
you never felt beautiful, did you, and now,
when I am so far from your ideal,
I’ve never felt more lovely—
which is to say there is something
inside, a radiance, that beacons through
the crumbling walls of the body,
and the real beauty is being in service
to that shine, becoming less and less
a vessel and more and more that light.
After All This Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, natural world, praise on February 19, 2025| 4 Comments »
my heart still leaps up
for red rock cliffs
that rise from the river,
still thrills at the way
spruce trees grow
(how do they do it?)
out of near vertical walls,
their evergreen branches
bearing the silver
weight of snow.
The older I get,
the greater my wonder.
The older I get,
the more grateful I am
to rise into morning.
The older I get,
the more I want
to offer my breath
in praise of what is beautiful,
resilient and strong.
The turmoil is all around us,
and yet there is so much
that finds a way
not just to survive,
but to shine.
Inner Dance
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, dance, paradox, stillness on October 26, 2024| 8 Comments »
Dancing inside me is the one
who has spent her whole life dancing,
the one who leaps up
the moment the music begins
and starts to twirl and leap
and give herself over to moving
in any way her feet
and arms and shoulders and spine
want to move. Sometimes
she needs no music at all,
just moves for the wild joy of moving.
She is just starting to notice
the other woman inside,
the one who looks more
as if she’s standing still.
The one who whose movements rhyme
with limestone, whose eyes are clear
as deep mountain lakes.
Only recently has she
begun to see
this, too, is
dancing.
After All These Years
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, body, self-compassion on September 25, 2024| 15 Comments »
Once they were slender,
this arm, this waist,
and I loved them
when they were slender.
Though that’s a lie.
I did not love them.
Never once did I think
they were slender enough.
But I was happier then
with my body, wasn’t I?
When it was lean and smooth
and strong? No. It’s a lie.
I was cruel to that body,
and pushed it and starved it
and glared at it in the mirror
with hateful, critical eyes.
It’s so strange that the body
I’m learning to love is the one
that once disgusted me.
This one with its strange roll
around my waist, this one with its
thick upper arms that stun me
in photos. This one with its
marbled flesh. Is it true
I am learning to love this body?
Perhaps it’s more true
I’m learning to love the one
who is learning to love this body.
How gentle it is, this learning.
How layered. How slowly it arrives.
How quiet, the invitation
to turn toward the one
who could despise this body
and not push her away.
To wrap her instead in these
thick soft arms and choose
to love her.
One Caress
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, hands, love, touch on June 8, 2024| 4 Comments »
touching you
even these old scarred hands
become wings
There Is an Old Woman Inside Me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, inner self on May 5, 2024| 10 Comments »
There is an old woman inside me
with long gray hair and fuzzy green eyes.
She is soft in the way stones are soft
when tumbled by waves for a hundred years.
She is still as I run from room to room
content to listen to my bluster,
to watch the day unfold.
Her smile is gentle as dawn light
as she hums a wordless tune.
And as I make calls and check schedules,
she curls in the lap of my busyness
like an ash-colored cat,
her body warm and relaxed.
I love the old woman inside me,
gnarled as the branches of an old peach tree.
She is no stranger to how the world changes.
Every day I practice to be more like her,
slow as honey, quiet as moonlight,
familiar as the woman in the mirror.
Doing Water Aerobics in the Senior Living Community with Janie Bird
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, resilience, swimming, women on June 20, 2023| 6 Comments »
She is over nine decades old,
this woman playing Pitbull
and Taylor Swift. Now run,
she says, and we do our best
to get somewhere by going nowhere
in the turquoise pool.
And she smiles as she tells us
to crisscross our arms, palms facing in,
to scissor our legs as if we are skiing,
to work harder, to make it our best.
I laugh like a child because it’s fun,
this hour when we play in the water,
frisky as ducklings, tender as saplings
inside old trunks, joyful
as old women who remember
how good it feels to be buoyant
as geese, resilient as ourselves.
Still Singing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, musical, self, singing, Sound of Music, theater on October 24, 2022| 7 Comments »
There comes a day when a woman knows
she’s more Mother Superior than Maria—
and though she spent decades dreaming
of spinning on stage singing The hills are alive,
she now knows she’s more likely
to be cast standing in a habit, clutching a rosary,
singing Climb every mountain.
How many dreams pass us
before we realize they’ve gone?
Already I know I will never climb Everest,
will not be an Olympic Nordic skier,
will not research the cure for AIDS.
Every day I am less the woman I dreamt I would be
and more the woman I am—
which is, apparently, a woman who sits in the balcony
to see “The Sound of Music” and drives home happy,
still singing about how her heart
wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise
from the lake to the trees.
A woman who is learning how,
now that her dreams have faded,
she can be more present than ever.
Still Learning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, butterfly, learning, story on December 9, 2021| 9 Comments »
Tonight when I see a photo
of myself from almost thirty years ago,
I stare at the woman in white lace
the way a butterfly might stare
at that strange nibbling larva—
curious. It doesn’t occur to me
to tell her about what will happen.
I flit by as she stays on the wall.
She’ll learn soon enough. I breathe
into my wings. She’ll learn.