Caregiver’s Lament
I’m on the couch, somewhere in between sitting and reclining. My right leg is extended out in front of me, clad in a cast to the knee and elevated on an ottoman with a large sofa cushion on top. My left foot is resting on a stool. This is a position I’ve spent most of […]
On Technology, Mobility, and Relinquishing Control
Techno Turbulence, with Mobility Hiatus Ahead The daylight came, an everyday miracle and I rose to it with pure intentions. My poet’s heart drummed insistent rhythm, and I sang along with equanimity. Thing one: A stack of forms to be filled and filed on behalf of a dear one. Make it yesterday, please, An email […]
From the First of November, 2017
Because sometimes it takes a whole month to write it down. I type with hands that are redolent with garlic, onion, and freshly grated ginger. Today contains a chunk of time for cooking, with hearty stew for him, and Indian spinach rice, spicy, for her. I walk and sit and rest and work with a […]
The Man in the Grocery Line
Certain special needs are invisible, or really hard to spot. This can include Autism, in some people. That isn’t Bink’s reality, though. Anyone of the neurotypical persuasion who takes more than a minute to observe my adult daughter will understand that something’s up. The way she carries herself, her frequent self-talk and singing, her hands […]
Inner Child Remembers
Before The Tax that adolescence imposes on body, mind, and spirit, probably in that order, there were hearty chunks of time that were some sort of unencumbered. Inner Child remembers discovering the fairies living well in tall flowers near the sandbox. How I loved to honor them, grabbing kid-sized chubby handfuls of sand and running […]
Autographing Autumn
I was walking, first field– verdant, moist , glorious carpet of greens, and the woods edged closer, with a beckoning trail, and then the floor was pine needles, punctuated with wily old roots in no pattern whatsoever. Sky was rarified blue, bluer, an artist’s glad canvas, background perfection to the leaves! Yellow and orange, rusty […]
BRIDGES
We are pausing on a bridge over the dwindling stream that crawls through our large, local dollop of green, Bird Park, because we always pause, she and I, on every little bridge that spans any river anywhere, so she can look down from first one side, then the other, at that liquid light which is […]
The Art of Being Present
art by my friend Marina Powdermaker. Find more of her work at https://www.etsy.com/shop/MarinaPowdermaker PAST where I am rereading the same testimonies from the same perspective: accused, accuser, over and over the details wearing deep grooves into the ledger in my mind. It must be truth, Mind says then, because I can’t erase the lines. FUTURE […]
Perhaps you’re an island, but you’re still in the world.
Mass Deception There’s no wonder here. No wonder we are so tight tense irritable. Sick more often. No surprise, no wonderful to see you, no more pleasantries masking indifference or contempt. We have been stripped, no more luxury of pretty gauzy layers. Gone are the rote smiles and murmurings of sorry I’m sorry excuse me […]
In Times Like These: Silver Linings of Caregiving
THANK YOU, TEDIUM In the midst of the interminable news; all-bad-all-the-time, chaos and tragedy, aftermath and predictions, close ups and sound bites that feed worry and starve hope, invite helplessness, inside this swirl, this modern quotidian, there is something else, not exactly calm, but steadier ground, and I, who have recently allowed my own […]