Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

April is….on Autism, Art, and Friendly Commerce

APRIL IS… As you may know, April is Autism Awareness Month. It’s also National Card and Letter Writing Month. Please allow me to make things more interesting by combining the two! Bink paints once a week, usually working on two canvases at a time. I also dabble in paints and colored pencils, with a nod […]

AUTISM AWARENESS DAY Redux

I’m re-posting this poem in recognition of “World Autism Awareness Day.”   As D, a sister mom from my autism tribe, has said, ” We are aware. We are very aware.”   Autism Awareness month is April, World Autism Awareness Day, April 2 and, in case the day lacks color, (as if any day with Autism […]

All This Joy, All This Sorrow

Monday, March 28, morning. It’s snowing as I write this.  Big, fluffy flakes that arrive past the date of our northern hemisphere Spring equinox.  I wonder if they know they won’t accumulate. If they did know, would their especially short lifespan would matter to them?  I suspect not.  Nature cycles despite our self-important desires and […]

I Wish You Knew

In the Garden   Imagine if you will, dear one, dear one and all, that you are sent to manifest something unique and quite vital to the world.  You arrive as rich seeded earth, landing in just the right geographic location to support your eventual yield. The trees and the flowers and the shrubs in […]

Folliculi, Follicula

TEND and SAVOR “Why the hair is attached to the head it will not come out please respond to me in a video.” These were the first words Bink communicated to me today, shortly after she got up.  I’ve answered this question—one of about six in the current sequence that makes up part of my […]

Saved

  It is a blessing to find those things that save us in small ways. At the checkout counter a teenaged boy offered to carry groceries for an old couple. They said yes, and I was quietly saved. Last Tuesday, late morning, a brief shaft of early winter sun reached down between sooty clouds, illuminating […]

Integration

It has been almost a month since my mother passed. It wasn’t unexpected. She was old and ill and tired. She wanted to go, was impatient with the way those final months seemed to drag and throw more miseries her way. I was able to mark 60 of my birthdays with her still in the […]

Headway Happening Here

Smile Last time it was Tuesday, six months and four days ago. The incredible Dr. S managed a first— pedaling the chair back just a bit, your face more accessible, sunglasses shielding your eyes from too-bright light. He touched twenty dulled pearls with his counter, probing slyly, quickly, distracting with wide smiles, silly faces, a […]

WALKING HER HOME

Adrift. That’s the word that floated into my teary vision as I sat in my car outside the facility my mother has resided in for the past seven years. These after-visit pauses have become part of my ritual in the past few months. There is always someplace else I need to be, fitting in my […]

What Do You Know?

What do we know for sure? I find myself wondering, lately, if we mostly hold the beliefs that suit our ease. For some, self-contempt can provide a kind of familiarity which becomes belief. For others, there is ease in what’s left after all the anger—which is really a mutation of pain—gets bored and leaves, or […]