sometimes, coming or going home, i pull off the road and down the drive to the house that began one hundred sixty years ago. i think about julia bybee, who came to this place in wagons from kentucky with two small children and made this homestead when her husband came with gold from california. who bore eleven children in all and lived from the land and whose dust lies in lot 92 just off 26th and stark. i have walked by it accidentally.
i wonder if she was ever stopped in her kitchen by the weight of it all, and looked out at the same river passing by and the time passing by and worried if she'd done enough, if she was failing her family, if she was going crazy or just growing older. did she stew over the civil rights of others as the war broke out? did she worry over her friends? did she wake in the night, drenched in uncertainty? did she have a place to rest? i wonder if, inside those walls, she was able to say the words to another woman. if she found dickinson. did she read, "i felt a funeral in my brain" and let it shiver through her bones? sometimes i stop here for reminding. that i am not the first or the only or know even a scratch of what is hard. that echoing through the dirt beneath my feet is the shining delight and the labyrinth of heartache it means to be a woman and a mother in this world.

i think it was around this unscripted moment, watching my old friend adore his almost wife, that i started welling up. fast forward a bit to the ceremony, in a cozy room in an elderly inn, when his partner, (a beautiful, published poet) bravely read aloud these words she had written for him a half a year before, and you can imagine how the welling turned to full on blubbering. it was an extraordinary evening.

WHEN YOU HEAR THIS
For Eric, on our wedding day

When you hear this poem, it will be December
on the near longest night of the year.
Though now I look out at the green leaves and green sounds
of locusts swell across the wide June day,
when you hear this, firest will be lit in the fireplaces
and outside: the cold, pressing in.
Right now it's June and we're apart
I'm missing you in a different state. But
the goldfinch you can't see on the fence outside my window
will, when you hear this, fly into the room, out of the past ---
you'll see it in the fluttering candles.

When you hear this, the hairs on our heads will be different lengths,
the moons of our fingernails in different phases,
the lives of those we know and those we don't
will have changed a little --- or a lot--- and the thoughts
crossing our minds will make new tracks in that new day
not yet underfoot.

But when you hear this poem, my love,
today will be today
and the different fires of June and Decemeber
will burn together in the room
and our separate families, separate friends,
will sit behind us, together, in rows
and you will know when you hear this
that all my old selves and all the months and years
have banded together for love of you---
that loving you has become a thread
that binds my days anew.

If you can hear now
this union in my voice, it must mean we're here
in the soft light of a warm room
carved out of early winter darkness ---
it must mean I'm looking at you
and the day's arrived
when we choose to pull the future near
and rename it "Today" in each other's eyes
and love it together with our fullest hearts
for as long, oh, as long
as we may.

- Jessica Garratt

family {the chorus}

tickled to be asked to join the chorus, carefully and lovingly led by amy grace.

there are many. but then there is this. mom in her apron and giggling auntie. encompassing all of us. weary steps and mended fences. good food, hilarity, gaping hearts. hiding and guarding and breaking wide open. many theatrics. top of lung singing. parties with themes. costumes galore. walks and walks and walks at the shore. millions of times where we map it all out. thousands of tears and the warmth of real hugs. things remembered slung out of sling shots of years. leaving the rest in the sand.

a chorus

amy grace, a beautiful writer and photographer, contacted me recently, with an invitation to add to her loving contribution to the web and spot on tribute to women artists. because i spend so much time behind a screen in my work, i am not a big blog reader simply because i prefer to turn pages. so i was unfamiliar with the chorus before she reached out. then i read it. and then a lot of my feelings about internet and false connectedness and skepticism of others' motives got all tossed around a bit.

here were real women, not all "celebrity bloggers" nor ever professing anything of the sort, speaking plainly and poetically about the realities of navigating the perfect storm that is our sisterhood. showing their bones. i was all in.

and because of that i had to make live this little blog i'd been hoarding away, and release the website i have re-worked no less than 147 times in the last few years, while leaving a dated ancient one live for folks to visit. i had made it awfully hard to find me on the internet, both purposely in some ways and totally accidentally. i'm funny, and dumb like that.

so thank you, amy, for asking specifically for my words and showing me a place where there really is connection to be had, being connected over the internets. also, for the bravery you didn't even know you were bestowing on me. and for believing. for inviting us to come to the chorus with our own off key cracking voices of love and loss and total surrender.

thoughts after 3 days of snow when living on an island outside a city that gets very little weather weirdness:
- it's nicer to stay home for days at a time because the roads are slick and you're a terrible driver anyhow than because you are grief stricken and looking around for your dog or terribly ill or some such thing. the looking inward and the forced togetherness and the creative cooking and the far slowed pace feels right and like we needed it.
- i miss neighborhoods. and the friends in them. and walking to markets and pubs.
- it is terribly terribly beautiful out here though.
- things really are rarely what they seem. we have these glimpses into others' lives through all manner of filters and think we've figured each other out, but cannot. know it all. not just by reading words on a screen and seeing pictures made pretty.
this little image was made after strong words and rolled eyes and arguing about hot showers (because that is so RIDICULOUS after hours in the snow with slush in your galoshes) and irate responses and a whole big mess of escalating emotion; thus the walking many feet in front of me. and the swear words thankfully muffled by my scarf. and the feelings of failing. and the general pissedoffedness. but i couldn't resist taking the picture. and it might suggest peace and beauty and "a lovely life" but it is really just a scrap of one being sewn together with thick clumsy fingers and no thimble, and doubt and hope and hard core love. we are all just doing our best. that might be the only thing we can safely presume.