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Posts Tagged ‘college’

Leaving the Film Festival the Day Before My Daughter Leaves for College

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 7, 2026| 4 Comments »


 
 
High angle shot: we see the main character,
dressed in boots, a pale orange sweater 
and a brown cowboy hat, emerging slowly 
from a theater with a throng of others. 
She looks small, vulnerable. Close up: reveals
she’s been crying, no, is still crying, but perhaps
trying not to cry. Medium shot. A beautiful young woman, 
late teens, in a gray t-shirt, long brown hair floating loose
around her shoulders, comforts the main character. 
Asks her if she would like to go for a walk instead 
of getting back in line to see another film. 
The main character shakes her head, then nods, 
laughs, even as the tears continue to fall. Insists 
that even though she cries so much, the movie 
that would be made about her is a comedy. 
The young woman rolls her eyes, nods, 
takes the woman in the hat by the hand, walks her 
away from the crowd. Long shot reveals they are 
in high mountains, the aspen not yet changing, 
but there’s a golden hue to their green. Above the aspen,
the spruce are thick, and above tree line, the sheer cliffs 
tower, red and gray, shadowed, then spangled with the kind 
of light you see in movies but can’t imagine
in your own life. But it is her own life. And she walks
with the smiling but serious young woman who is her daughter
through the unbearably beautiful set. The camera shot
changes to her point of view, focusing on the small brown bird
that sits on a railing beside her, then on the green leaves fluttering
above them, then on her own hand twined with her daughter’s,
the touch light and familiar. There are no lines for this scene
in which she wonders how she ever got lucky enough to nab 
this leading role and the supporting role in this other story.
After the preparation, the letting go. 
So much is about to change. 
She’s determined to give it her everything.

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Fledgling

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 3, 2026| 11 Comments »

 
 
Now that I know for certain she will leave me, 
I dare to love her more. Her room will be empty.
The house no longer filled with her music. 
The spilling trills of her laughter too far away to hear. 
I have known since her birth she would leave me, 
but knowing is different from feeling, and her absence 
comes so soon. At the same time the heart lets her go, 
lets her go, lets her go, it leans in closer, becomes a sanctuary 
that knows no walls, a nest as wide as the world. 
At the same time I release her, I fall more deeply in love 
with the way she croons to her cat, with the feathery softness
of her skin, with how a song is ever winging from her lips. 
I welcome it, this ache. These tears were always meant 
to be cried. This heart was always meant to break. 

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Reunion

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 28, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
And though it has begun to rain
and the Bernedoodle jumps and squirms
between us and though it has been
thirty three years since last I saw her,
I want to linger in the yard when I hug Susie,  
and for a moment I am again eighteen
and we are snowshoeing up a fourteen-thousand-
foot peak. The winter sun is brilliant; we
are laughing and I’m exhausted and so alive,
and I am standing in a suburb as golden
leaves whirl and Susie is in velveteen pants,
her hair streaked gray, and she is not at all the same
girl I remember and also exactly the same,
meeting me with a smile, offering to carry
what is mine, speaking of gardens and knitting
and tea. And we’re on the summit of Mt. Elbert
and I wrap my arms around those girls we were.
I thank them for loving each other then,
how that love opens a door to this very moment
to create an intimacy that needed no tending,
as mullein seeds sometimes wait decades
before they bloom. I release Susie and bend
to nuzzle her puppy, a marvel of zeal and scruff.
Is it rain on my face, or tears? I take that young
girl I was by the hand. She walks inside with us.

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Right Now, Mid-Story

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 22, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
I am placing a bookmark on this page
in which my daughter and I drive
highways and turnpikes and green
curving backroads, singing
our way past tree farms and smoke
stacks, past sheep and cornfields,
grand estates and collapsed barn roofs,
this page on which, in every moment,
we are driving right up to the blank
edge where the story is still seeking
its setting and the narrator is still
seeking her voice and the page is
still seeking the fingers that will turn
it and those fingers are still so soft
as, with total trust, they hold my hand.

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In Matthias Hall

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 26, 2019| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

Years later I wake in the night and remember

the way he banged on my bedroom door.

He was drunk and he begged me to let him in.

 

I was in my dorm room bed, and my best friend

was visiting. The interruption angered her

and she hissed in the dark, Don’t you dare.

 

I told him to go away. He didn’t.

He pounded and begged and shouted.

Please, he said, before I heard him crumple

 

at the base of the door where I believe

he fell asleep. By morning, he was gone.

It wasn’t only my door I had closed,

 

it was my heart. I didn’t understand then

that I was too frightened to let him in.

I didn’t comprehend how our fear

 

makes us small. Years later, I want

to open the door. I want to meet him

before the drunken night and tell him, I hear you.

 

I want to thank him for bringing me his heart.

I want to tell myself, You are capable

of sharing difficult feelings. I want

 

to write a new night and walk with him

through the dark, the only pounding

our fragile hearts.

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