Plain vanilla. Soft serve.
You loved simple things, Dad.
On this day of your birth
I am a pilgrim who arrives
by car at the drive up window
at the closest DQ, an hour away.
There is devotion in the way
I savor the cold. The cake cone
melts on my tongue like a wafer.
There is joy in sampling
what brought you joy.
I ate the whole thing, Dad,
though it was too much.
But I didn’t want to waste
a bit of it. For those few sweet
moments, it tasted like
having you back.
Posts Tagged ‘memory’
Dairy Queen Drive Thru
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, father, food, grief, ice cream, memory on July 6, 2024| 19 Comments »
In the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cacti, domes, healing, memory, pain on July 1, 2024| 12 Comments »
for Jen Meyer It was innocent to start, how Jenny and I gathered the dried bits of cacti that had fallen on the trail in the desert dome in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Inside the dome, it was hot; outside, snow, and at eight years old, we had never before seen anything so prickly, raised as we were amongst trillium and violets. Perhaps the docents had told us not to touch. Surely we knew better than to take something we found, but we gathered the strange and spiky rounds like the treasure they were and carried them in our knit hats. Years later, I can’t recall how we were caught. But I remember the sting of thousands of hair-thin spines in my scalp, my skin. That was how I learned something unusual and beautiful could also be cruel, that some things will hurt you simply because that is how they are made. But oh, how I love that girl, the one who wanted so badly to touch and be touched by the world. Keep touching, I want to tell her. Even when it hurts. There is so much you will never know any other way. |
Preserving Sweetness
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.
What Lives On
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged joy, mariachi, memory, music on March 13, 2024| 10 Comments »
It didn’t last, but there was that afternoon
when we were walking side by side
down the middle of the street,
all four of us straddling the center line,
different musicians every few blocks.
It was Father’s Day. The alpine sun
was hot but not unbearable, and we stopped
to listen to the bright brass of the mariachi band.
My kids were not embarrassed when I hummed along
to Guantanamera—or at least they did not tell me so.
We laughed about I don’t remember what, but
I remember the laughter and the light,
easy feeling I had, a full-body certainty
everything was going to be okay.
I remember how our shadows
stretched out on the street in front of us
like a future I could not read.
I fell in love with the shape of our shadows,
not knowing how soon there would be only three.
These moments of gladness—
like notes in the summer air, they don’t stay.
But they stitch themselves into our being,
a goodness that lives and lives,
sometimes hidden for years until
it sings back to life with joy so real
I can almost feel the sun on my back,
can almost hear all of our voices
join the chorus for La Bamba.
Even now, alone in my quiet room,
my smile is as real as the tightness
in my chest, as real as those trumpets,
real, that blue, blue sky.
If the Heart Could Dog Ear a Day, There Would Be This Moment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, daughter, grace, memory, photograph, rain, reverence on March 12, 2024| 11 Comments »
The autumn rain was not warm, but soft,
the kind that makes everything shine.
Even the sidewalk. Even a Tuesday.
Likely the air smelled of leaves and cut grass.
Likely the birds were a riotous chorus,
because that’s how it is here in fall.
What I remember so clear is how you
rushed out the front door
in your favorite hand-me-down dress
with brown velvet polka dots
and a pink satin sash—
mighty fancy for a day spent at home—
and began to dance on the driveway,
both arms lifting into the drizzle,
an elegant twist to both small wrists,
one leg stretched straight,
your bare toes pointed to the pavement,
your face raised up to the rain.
It’s your smile that startles me,
then and now, a look of deep contentment,
measureless pleasure in being.
Over ten years later, I still see it in you,
something utterly unfakeable, wildly true,
the capacity for joy beyond the frame.
It vibrates in me like the tone
of a gong struck gentle and long,
until I too am shining
with trembling reverence,
astonished by the grace that’s here.
Even when it’s gray. Grayer. Even when it’s cold.
Woodsy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged candle, hiking, memory, mountain, spruce, trees on January 18, 2024| 8 Comments »
somewhere above Telluride, Colorado
If you close your eyes and just breathe in,
then it’s sixteen years ago and we’re off the trail
roaming through damp autumn woods.
The duff is soft with needles, moss,
and the air is scented with resinous spruce—
fresh and woodsy, tangy, bright.
Sun filters into the evergreen glade
to kiss the clearing with light. Remember, love?
Whatever dreams we brought in with us,
they, too, came to smell of earth, forest,
musk and shade. The mountains
had their way with us that day.
We said little, but by the time we left,
shadow-drunk and gloriously map-less,
everything had changed.
Inner Fusion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, driving, father, gratefulness, grief, memory, New York on January 11, 2024| 8 Comments »
How does it happen,
you’re driving and the mind
opens a door closed for decades
and suddenly you’re sitting
at an elegant white table
with white linen napkins
and a single white rose
in a restaurant in The Plaza Hotel
in downtown New York City
and your father sits across
from you, his smile wide,
his eyes bright, and you’re fifteen
and you’ve never before
been in a place like this
and it’s wonderful, this strange
and beautiful scene where
you don’t belong and yet
all worlds seem to merge into this one
where you’re driving through snow
on the winding river road and
your father is here holding your hand
as you look at the menu and
accelerate through the curve
as he taught you and
he loves you and though
he is dead now, you can’t stop
saying thank you.
Because in a year or twenty I won’t remember
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, indwelling, memory, moment, time on January 7, 2024| 10 Comments »
the way this afternoon my daughter
wraps her arms around my shoulders
and hangs for a moment on my frame,
because I won’t remember
the simple curl of her smile
and how our necks bow forward slightly
so our foreheads lightly touch,
because I don’t remember hundreds of millions
of other small and precious slivers,
I let myself fully dwell into these seconds—
the warmth of her skin, the cool air of her room,
her window open even mid-winter—
and I pour myself into this moment
knowing how a liquid takes on the shape
of its container, and oh, how I long
to be shaped by this, even if it’s only for now.
Memory, Like a Passport
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, joy, memory, snow on December 27, 2023| 8 Comments »
That winter night you streaked
down the walkway in your undies
and jumped into the snowbank,
I think of it now,
your raucous laughter,
your feral joy
as you emerged frosty and grinning,
I think of how you wore your elation
on the outside,
not hidden up a sleeve,
not tucked in a pocket
where no one could see.
It didn’t save you, your wild joy—
perhaps that’s not what joy is for—
but some nights it saves me.
I still smell the clean sharp cold of it,
hear the glee-giddy,
mirth-ringing choruses of it
like an anthem to a country
that has changed its borders
and still, somehow, lets me in.
A Great Distance
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged distance, grief, hurt, intimacy, memory on December 19, 2023| 8 Comments »
Because there is no road to yesterday,
the shortest distance to you is memory,
and so the mind searches to meet the ache
the same way a tongue keeps reaching
for a sore tooth. Relentlessly.
With purpose. With a wince.
Because pain is a brilliant teacher.
Because somehow the reaching
makes the impossible distance less far.
Because I like feeling you close.
Tonight I Remember
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, letting go, loss, memory, shoes on November 16, 2023| 18 Comments »
how he resisted learning
to tie his own shoes,
how I cheered
when he learned
to pinch the laces
between his fingers,
knotting and looping
and pulling them tight,
making a bow
that would stay.
How I encouraged
the very thing
that allowed him
to walk away.
Oh, sweet woman
I was then,
beginning to learn
letting go.
Now that he’s gone,
I’m a student
of being loosened,
untied, undone,
still practicing
how to let him go.
Balancing Act
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dad, daughter, family, father, memory, support on October 29, 2023| 6 Comments »
When I was a girl, my father
would lie on his back, palms up.
I’d step barefoot into his hands
and slowly, slowly, he’d lift me.
I’d balance above him, floating
like an angel, like a circus star,
like a little girl who trusts her dad
to support her. Fifty years later,
I still feel his hands on my soles—
even this moment, I could rise.
Years Later, the Awe
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, light, memory, mother, time on September 27, 2023| 10 Comments »
Sometimes, for no reason, I remember
a car ride with my mother, driving
the old frontage road from school to home,
and I don’t remember what we spoke of,
don’t remember which car we were in,
don’t remember how old I was,
I remember only the way a bow of light
seemed to connect the sun
to the hood of our car, as if we were being
led forward by light itself, and
I, who knew so little of life, felt so deeply
and sweetly tethered to beauty.
Decades later, I still recall that awe,
but now I focus more on the woman
who sat in the driver’s seat, consider
how luminous she is, consider
the radiant bow that links her life to mine,
how even hundreds of miles away
she leads me with her light.
*
Il Poggione Brunello di Montalcino, 2004
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged complexity, container, gift, memory, wine on August 17, 2023| 14 Comments »
with thanks to Rae
Inside the glass bottle,
the wine from Sangiovese grapes—
aged in oak barrels for three years—
continues to age,
losing its youthful fruitiness,
becoming more heady,
more sour cherry, more rose.
A glass of such wine is like
a drinkable love letter to change.
So when the sommelier’s wife
gifts me a vintage from the year
my son was born,
I taste more than raspberry,
dried flowers, coconut and tobacco.
I taste deep red.
I taste rolling down grassy hills
and painting our faces with mud.
I taste sleepless nights and midnight fears.
Homework at the table.
Camping in the desert.
The vinosity of devotion.
Late summer swims in the pond.
The glass empty long before
I wish it were done.
In the Days Leading Up to His Death Anniversary
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death anniversary, grief, loss, memory, sensuousness, thisness on August 12, 2023| 17 Comments »
Strange how the body remembers
everything about this time of year—
the angle of light, the hue of sky,
the scent of almost rain,
the shape of the green beans
twisting on the vine. It remembers
the cool of the basement,
the curl of my hand as it slid
into his hand, remembers
the tilt of the hill where we drove,
the droning of bees in the sunflowers,
the brief blaze of fireflies.
It’s as if the shock of his death
opened every door of every sense
so I was flooded with life,
imprinted with the thisness of everything.
In these days leading up to his death,
life rings me, bell-like, again and again,
and I chime, charged with memory,
amazed how my own emptiness
is what allows for the world
to make in me such music,
so vital, so clear, so raw.
I Loved Those Years When
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fireworks, fourth of july, grandparents, memory on July 4, 2023| 6 Comments »
We sat in the grass
on my grandparents’ lawn
and watched fireworks
above the lagoon,
and as the sky glittered
gold and red and silver
and the humid air boomed
with the rapture of celebration,
my family a chorus of awe.
And the fireflies put on a show
of their own, and no one I loved
had died. How magic it all was.
Oh, how we ooohed, we ahhhed.
Father’s Day, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged father's day, happiness, memory, music on June 18, 2023| 3 Comments »
That was the year our small family
strolled the closed-off streets
in Ridgway and listened
to mariachi and country
and a fabulous upright bass.
And my son was at ease,
my daughter content
my husband smiling.
And I remember thinking,
Remember this.
Two years later, I remember
my joy in the moment
now tethered to me like a shadow.
I remember sun warm on our backs.
I remember even then knowing
happiness doesn’t last.
I remember telling myself,
sweetheart, remember.
And I remember. It’s so beautiful
it hurts. I remember.
One Foray
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged memory, morel, mushroom, time warp on May 25, 2023| 3 Comments »
orienting my day
by this constellation of morels
I find myself five years ago
Last Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged authenticity, grief, Lorrie Gardner, memory on May 8, 2023| 7 Comments »
for Lorrie Gardner
She was weeping that day,
the last day I saw her.
She stepped out of the shadow
into the late October sun,
and she held me on the sidewalk.
And I held her, too.
And we cried.
How many times
had we sat in the soft light
of her classroom
and laughed about things
the students had said?
We planned parties and
field trips and poetry lessons.
We spoke about goals for my children
and goals for ourselves
and kids losing teeth and
ways to teach vocabulary.
We spoke of divorce
and dance, jitters and singing,
ski technique and running
and feeling displaced.
On that last day I saw her,
I don’t remember what we said.
But I remember the open look of her face—
the way she didn’t try to hide her grief,
the way she didn’t try to avoid mine.
Of course we didn’t know then
it would be the last time.
Perhaps a younger version of me
would judge the memory,
would wish we had been smiling,
but I am so grateful to remember
the truth of that moment:
her broken open heart,
my broken open heart,
our arms around each other
with love so fierce, so soft.
Ode to the Empty Cup
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cup, emptiness, memory, thirst on May 3, 2023| 12 Comments »
There are cups on my shelf
I will never use—
cups that will never hold tea
nor water nor coffee.
It brings me such joy
they are there, though,
filled, as they are,
with memories.
Perhaps this is how
I begin to teach
the thirstiest parts of me
that a cup without something
tangible in it
is not always empty.