In a city where we meet,
mom arrives with thin
rye crackers, dill Havarti,
carrots, fresh raspberries,
a tea kettle, and packets
of peppermint tea—all
things she knows I love.
And sipping right now from
the slender, porcelain
pansy mug she wrapped in
clothes and brought in her suitcase,
I listen in the dark of the hotel
to the soft, even luff of her breath
as she sleeps, and inside it
I hear the light of her, the
generous light, the tender light,
a nectary of light, a clear channel
of light that teaches me something
of how to live in these long, cold
volumes of night.
Posts Tagged ‘home’
Home Away
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, generosity, home, light, mom, travel on November 14, 2025| 4 Comments »
Reunion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, home, mother, reunion, travel on August 10, 2024| Leave a Comment »
To drive through the starless night.
To arrive at the airport in time to greet
the traveler at the gate.
To embrace her in your arms
and nuzzle your nose in her hair.
To be nowhere in that moment
but there. To stare into her face
until the heart is satisfied
and the lungs remember
how to breathe. To see
in her eyes a constellation
that helps you navigate home. To know
reunion’s sweeter for the letting go.
Where We’re From
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, Colorado, home, landscape, natural world, wisconsin on July 16, 2024| 8 Comments »
Though I love this high desert,
I am a lake walking amidst
the cactus and the pinyon pine.
I am sunsets on flat water
and waves in the spring.
I bring my white trillium soul
to the arroyo and let dry sand
run through my fingers.
They never leave me,
these Wisconsin summers,
even though I left them when
I was a barefoot girl,
even though I’ve made a home
amongst red rock cliffs and empty
river beds where the gray trunks
of juniper twist in deep curves
and red-tailed hawks spiral
making visible the wind.
How surprising it is to discover now
in my silvering years some new
insight into what it means to belong:
how sometimes we choose,
how sometimes we are chosen.
There Is This Moment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, home, joy, music on June 20, 2024| 12 Comments »
with the full moon rising
and a large bird of prey
gliding spirals in the sky
and my husband on my right
my sweet friend on my left
and the two-person band
transforming sorrow into joy
just by singing it in harmony
and giving the song their everything,
and maybe that’s what is ours to do—
to give ourselves wholly to a moment
as if we are the singers and life the song,
so I give myself to the low summer sun
and the dust on my feet,
to the pucker of lime
and the tears of my friend,
give myself to the ache that never leaves
and the relentless beauty that ever arrives,
and the more I give myself to the world,
the more the world rushes in
and says home, home, home,
you are home.
One Vacation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, mountain, vacation on November 26, 2023| 4 Comments »
joy in the city—
we return home
to sleep like mountains
The Humming
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, home, icu, mom, song on October 15, 2023| 26 Comments »
And there in the ICU, amidst the tubes
and rubber gloves, amongst the pillows
and the scent of disinfectant,
we build a house of song,
a house with rafters of “Moon River”
and a foundation of “Amazing Grace.”
There are lintels of “Wild Mountain Thyme”
and a hearth of “The Water is Wide,”
For an hour, we live inside the tunes
as they surround us, familiar rooms
where laughter is welcome,
where sleep might come,
where we live not outside of time,
but inside its melodic chambers,
not escaping the fear and the pain,
but companioning it with so much love,
so much beauty that somehow,
even in the halls of distress,
we nestle deeper in and feel safe.
*
Hi friends–oh my sweet mama is having a tough time–multiple surgeries, so many side swipes. It’s been a crazy time. At this moment, she seems to be stabilizing. Tonight I am so grateful for everyone who works in the medical professions–from those who leave home in the middle of the night to do emergency surgeries to those who keep the hospital floors clean–thank you to all who help those who need healing.
One Journey
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged driving, home, journey, travel on August 15, 2023| 3 Comments »
driving three hundred eleven miles—
learning to call every inch of the trip
home
First Time Driving in the Berkshires
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged becoming, daughter, dreams, home, parenting on May 5, 2023| 6 Comments »
I could live here, says my daughter;
and staring into the generous green
and the time-softened hills,
she sees an open door in the landscape,
a door she could walk through
and call the new place home—
and I watch as she becomes
the hero of her own story,
watch as in the passenger seat
she grows wings, listen as she hums
like a tuning fork suddenly come alive,
struck by her own dreams,
and mygod, its beautiful watching
as aspiration slips itself into her body
and whispers possibilities
and bids her keep her eyes open.
Before the Burial
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, gratitude, grief, home, loss, mother, self-talk, son on June 14, 2022| 13 Comments »
Because I can, I carry the box with your ashes
around the house as if you’re a baby on my hip.
I point out things and explain them,
just as I did when you were young and alive.
There, I say, there is where you practiced piano.
Here, I say, is where you sat at the counter
and wept when I told you the story
of Cinderella. And here is the wall
where we hung all your artwork.
And here is the room where you slept.
Here’s the plant you gave me last year—
see how it’s doubled in size?
And here’s the new couch in the place
where the old couch once was,
the one on which we snuggled each morning
before school. I walk the floor as I did
when you were young and fussy and needed
touch and movement to calm you.
Now I am the one who is calmed by the walking.
So familiar, these steps around the kitchen island,
these steps around the table.
So familiar, this weight on my hip.
Soon we will place this small wooden box
in the ground, so while I still can, I carry you.
Oh sweetheart, how is it I’m thriving amidst this gravity?
It is, I am sure, because I, too, am deeply companioned,
carried from moment to moment, from space to space.
And though I don’t hear it, there is perhaps a voice
that says to me, Here is where you lit
a candle every day. Here is where you practiced
to love in new ways. And here is where
you did not judge yourself as you wept.
Here is the place where you did nothing but breathe.
And here is where you thought of all the people
who have carried you.
And here is where you said thank you.
At the Houston Zoo
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, bird, home, nest, pigeon, zoo on July 13, 2021| 2 Comments »
Not the chuckwalla
nor the cheetah nor the capybara,
it was the pigeon
I couldn’t stop watching
as it sat on its nest
in the tall sturdy grass
beside the glassed-in walls
of the chimpanzees
with its fluffy grey chicks
tucked against its grey breast.
She looked as if she belonged
exactly where she was—oh
how I cherish that feeling.
Motherhood
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beaver, home, mothering, parenting, resilience on April 30, 2021| 1 Comment »
—with thanks to the wise Rebecca Mullen
Today, again, I praise the beaver
who spends her life building,
rebuilding, rebuilding
her lodge where her young will live.
With small sticks and big sticks
and tall solid trunks,
with logs and rocks and mud,
with her teeth she builds a home,
builds it on moving water.
Because rain, because snow,
because warm, because cold,
because flow, because flow, because flow,
her home is forever in need of repair.
And so on a day when a surprise storm
has flooded the stream
and washed much of my lodge away,
I honor the beaver,
stalwart, resilient, habitual.
I notice the longing to move to land,
then I gather new sticks of courage.
Stones of forgiveness.
Logs of compassion
and the deep sticky mud of love.
I wade to the middle
of the current.
I, like all the other mothers,
I build this home again.
Home
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arriving, home, nature, river on March 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Even after all these years
of wandering this twisting path of self,
how is it I am still surprised
to find a new home inside the rush of river,
as if I haven’t been here
in this song of melting many times before?
How is it I forgot my home
inside the brittle brown grass of March,
home in the sweet moldering scent of spring,
home in the sun soaked day—
as if the great star of beginnings
is saying again to me, Come, friend.
How is it I sometimes forget to arrive
exactly where I am, especially in these days
when forgiveness arrives like the cranes
on great wings that charge the air.
These days when love comes crashing in
like western wind, breaking branches
and rearranging the yard, as if to say
it is here to change everything.
Sometimes I forget the world will find me
wherever I am and insist in the language
of willow and trunk and hawk and noon,
home, home, you are home.
The Song Speaks
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, longing, loss, love, song on March 4, 2021| 4 Comments »
Lyrics from “Golden Slumbers” by Paul McCartney and John Lennon
I love when my lyric
slips into your thoughts,
when I float from your lips
for hours. Once there was a way
to get back homeward.
Sometimes I even believe
my own lines.
Once there was a way
to get back home.
Sometimes when you sing me,
I have faith in home.
Please pretty darling do not cry.
And yet you do cry
and make me want to forget
I am a song about longing,
a song of loss.
I want to be the song of finding,
song of arriving together,
song of coming home.
I want to be the song
that lies down to sleep
beside your heart each night.
I will sing a lullaby.
I want to be the song
that that makes you breakfast.
The song that dances with you
in the living room.
The song that always stays.
Going Home
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book, character, driving, home, travel, ullysses on January 31, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Today I am so grateful
we are the characters
who go on a journey
and learn to find the bravest, best
and kindest versions of ourselves,
even when the road is beset
with Lestrygonians driving white Range Rovers,
especially when Charybdis tries to merge
into our crowded two-lane sea
after driving in the eddies of the emergency lane
to bypass the long lines,
yes, we are the characters who learn
that we are responsible for our own soundtrack
and must sing to meet each moment,
must be our own sirens calling ourselves
again and again and again
to crash only on our own shores
then sail on more carefully, more purposefully,
our song all the more joyful,
more determined, and yes, more alive.
Building the Snow People
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, play, snowmen on November 27, 2020| 4 Comments »
We rolled them out of backyard snow.
How quickly snow balls the size of a heart
become snow boulders the size of a man.
We gave them features
to make them more like us.
Dark brown stems and leaves of dried mint?
Those became hair. Carrots for noses,
of course. Small gray rocks for eyes.
Plus knobby sticks. Rust-colored leaves.
Thin icicles from the eaves.
The wail of a siren going by—
that went into them, too.
Plus a prayer for those in pain.
And a slip of blue Colorado sky.
We walked among them,
these rare guests in a time of quarantine,
and perhaps we felt our loneliness lift.
What is a snow man but a temporary cairn,
a dolled up trail marker that leads us
back to ourselves, back to our own backyard.
Today It Occurs to Me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, journey on August 27, 2020| 2 Comments »
Not all journeys require leaving the house.
Just this morning, I followed the hummingbird
as it circled the feeder, then flew to the flowerbed
and slipped its long beak into red nasturtiums.
And last night I wandered the garden rows,
pulling long carrots and thick round beets,
attending to the slow journey of ripening.
And all summer I follow the thin trail of loss,
how it leads me from one sorrow to another
my heart breaking open and then more open
then impossibly more open.
And all this sheltered summer, I navigate moments of beauty—
when I laugh at dinner until I fall off my chair,
mornings when the river runs startlingly clear,
the blue of larkspur, double rainbow over the drive,
the tender silence inside the shouting—
follow these moments like cairns in the wilderness,
that lead always to exactly where I am.
Prophecy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, milkweed, self image, self worth on June 29, 2020| 2 Comments »
One day you will forget to question your worthiness.
No matter what door you walk through, even your own,
you will feel no need to apologize,
concede no need to defend.
You’ll set down your big suitcase of hope
and never ever open it again.
It will not matter if you are greeted by others
with kisses or with snarls, no, you will know
your own value the way milkweeds do,
which is to say, not at all.
Common as dandelions.
Complex as supernova.
Your worth will be that natural, that assumed.
Always Home
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, home, song on June 6, 2020| 8 Comments »
And on that Saturday morning
when you feel isolated, alone,
no matter the time, or even
if it’s a Tuesday, call me.
I won’t be able to fix anything,
but I will remind you that you
are home, right there in your body,
you are home. And I will listen
as you weep. I will listen.
And though I won’t sing
in a way you can hear,
I will sing for you. I will sing
a circle around you,
I will sing you home.
Not the What but the How
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, memory, time on April 15, 2020| 4 Comments »
Mostly, we forget.
Mostly, the singular moments
that felt so important—
remarkable, even—
slip like raindrops
into a pond.
Most of my life
is blur, is watercolor.
But let me clearly remember
tonight, dying my daughter’s
hair blue, singing along
to the radio, laughing
about nothing in particular.
What I want to remember
is how little it takes
to make a moment light up
from within, light up
like dew infused by the sun—
each moment a teacher,
our own home the temple.