Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cause and effect, connection, friendship, interconnectedness, legacy on May 1, 2025| 6 Comments »
because
you,
me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, dad, kindness, legacy on October 30, 2024| 21 Comments »
for my dad
There was that time that he bought
a television for the woman who came
to the house to clean while he and mom were sick.
She had mentioned offhand hers had broken.
He was like that. Would take smoked salmon
for the men and women at the firehouse.
Would make certificates for people
to honor kind things they had done.
It was as if he could read the small thought bubbles
that appear above people’s heads,
the ones we read in cartoons
but can’t see in real life,
the ones that say what they really need,
and then he’d offer a kindness.
Not that he was a saint.
My god, could he get angry.
Not that he looked for people to care for,
more that he really looked at the people
who came across his path.
This is how I want him to live on in me,
his hands guiding mine to give.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brother, father, football, legacy, love on September 29, 2024| 4 Comments »
My brother paces the length of the football field,
following the play, unable to sit. I watch him
pause in the end zone, hands in his pockets,
eyes focused to the game, chin up, body tense.
How many times did I watch my father watch him
the same way he now watches his own son play?
“Hold your blocks,” he yells, his voice hoarse
and deep, full of certainty from his own days
in cleats. “Come on, Defense,” he growls,
half admonishment, all encouragement,
and I fall in love all over again with my father,
now dead, and my brother, so alive, how they give love
as if every moment is a goal line, as if they will never
ever stop cheering as loud as they can for family. For love.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apples, intention, legacy, memory, mom on June 27, 2024| 13 Comments »
The whole house smelled
of ripening then the day mom
made apples into sauce.
The heat from the stove
made the small kitchen
swelter, and the autumn air
almost shined with the bright
scent of Jonathan, Pippin,
Winesap, Cortland.
Her arms were strong then,
straining to push the blushing
pink mash through the sieve,
slow and stiff with the effort.
Perhaps there is a language
somewhere that has a word
for this: the way something sweet
can linger, how it flows over,
around and through the body
like the cidery scent of apples
till it lodges itself in the memory.
Oh Mama, I want to serve this
sweetness to you now,
the memory of you stirring
with two good, strong arms,
the way you put all of who you were
into the smallest of acts,
how fifty years later,
what you did that one afternoon
still matters.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged carrot, farmer, garden, gratefulness, legacy, Persia on October 30, 2022| 4 Comments »
When, in ancient Persia, the farmers
began to selectively breed wild carrots
to make them sweeter and minimize the woody core,
they could not have imagined how,
over two thousand years later,
a woman on another continent
would harvest hundreds and hundreds of carrots
on a late October day and,
as she pulled the long orange roots
from the near-frozen earth,
she would thank those farmers for their work.
Such a miracle of sweetness, the carrot—
so brittle, so high in sugar,
such a shocking brilliant orange.
And yet not a miracle.
The story of the carrot is like so many stories—
it is a testament to many hands over centuries
shaped it into what it is today.
I look at these hands of mine as they tug the rosettes,
as they scrape the loose dirt, as they trim.
What will they sow? What will they select?
What legacy of change will they leave?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gift, homage, legacy, memory, self-knowledge on January 7, 2022| 12 Comments »
for Janet Kaye Schoeberlein, March 26, 1930-Dec. 28, 2021
When I was fourteen, Jan gave me her flannel nightgowns,
the long white ones with tiny blue flowers
that I had admired on her for years.
When I wore them, I wore
the classical music always playing
in the background in her home.
I wore the high tilting treble of her voice
as she sang around the campfire.
I wore her world class hiccups that always
seemed to arrive when she didn’t approve
of what was about to happen.
I wore desert river adventures
and trips to the theater downtown
and dinners with foods I’d never tried before.
And though I didn’t know it then,
I wore the past of her childhood in Germany,
and her memory of how she graduated law school
as the only woman in her class.
I wore her willingness to raise her young nephew
and her joy in raising her daughter
and the way she always said my name
as if I were a south American flower.
Those nightgowns, I took their shape,
loved the way their soft cloth swirled
around my body, wrapping me in eccentricity.
I still wear the other hand me downs she gave me—
Curiosity. Independence. Individuality.
Because she was so herself,
she taught me I could trust myself to be me.
She was the queen of oddness,
a model of uniqueness,
an archetype of being true.
To this day I feel these qualities
swirl around me, too—
the comfort of her integrity
the warmth of her generosity,
the way Jan was so very, very Jan.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, death, father, legacy, missing on November 26, 2021| 6 Comments »
When you miss him, look inside.
—Deb Stevens, private correspondence
Today when I miss my father,
I hear him in my voice when I say,
You’ll go broke saving money.
I feel his tenderness in the way
I hold my own daughter’s hand.
His laugh blooms inside my laugh
when I giggle hee hee hee.
Here he is, ever inside me.
Returning home from his death,
I feel transformed,
or is it I feel more me—
the me he helped to shape
with his life, the me
he is fashioning with his death,
the me I’m still learning how to be.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, daughter, legacy, mother, mother's day, poem, poetry on May 8, 2016| 1 Comment »
Every morning when I was a girl
my mother would wake me
with song, the same lilting lyric
every dawn,
It’s going to be such a lovely day,
good morning, good morning I say.
It sounds too grand
to call it ceremony,
and she would have appeared
an unlikely celebrant
in her bathrobe and slippers,
but she infused
this daily ritual with prayer
and to this day I wake
certain that the world
will have beauty in it
and certain that I will find it—
this the most beautiful gift
any mother could give.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anapest, daughter, generation, grandmother, legacy, memory, waltz on February 11, 2016| 3 Comments »
recite this aloud, please, for Mimi, for Vivi, for me
Mama, she says,
can we waltz?
and we do,
we step one
two, three, one,
two three cross-
ing the room,
and again
I am five
and my grand-
ma and I
are alone
in the house
and my feet
are on hers
and we’re danc-
ing around
and she hums
with the ra-
dio, hums
with low light,
and we waltz,
and we waltz
there’s a blaze
in her eyes
as we one,
two three, oh
how I miss
her tonight.