I Keep Crying in Yoga Class

usually in child’s pose...

because it’s June

so soon, and my mind’s 

still stuck in March

when we four siblings 

last time lived together 

in our family home and 

took it all apart

now, just scratch the surface

and there’s tears

because it sold (what a relief!) and

I can’t stop thinking about the

quick blink of these past 25 years

the house precariously maintained

by Mom, and lucky for us it was enough!

but nothing compared to how Dad loved it

I took for granted his constant house projects 

growing up: Mariner’s game on the radio

interspersed with sound of the circular saw

my childhood disinterest in all his hard work

replaced now by adult understanding and awe

and what would he think of what it became?

these shining hardwood floors, the 

pristinely-pressure washed and

painted decks, the new French doors?

sorrow rising up in me when

I think of golden moments

only realized after they are gone

and pride picturing Dad smiling 

up in heaven, as we cash in his 

house to take care of Mom 😍

Our House

Our house

is a very very very fine house

with 2 cats in the yard

life used to be so hard

now everything is easy cuz of you 

~ Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

https://youtu.be/tKYjUn-SBcg

Our Dad loved our house.  Besides his family and his accounting business, it was probably the major focus of his life.  Who can forget how he dug out the basement, one bucket of dirt at a time, before refinishing it, paying the neighborhood kids 5 cents a bucket? (5 cents!) 

Recently my siblings and I sort of out-loud wondered “what did he do with all that dirt?” and my childhood memory doesn’t include that detail but most likely he used it to grade the front yard where he built a retaining wall.  He also built a wrap around deck on which we had more cookouts than can be counted.  He wanted to get a wood-burning stove for the rec room basement and talked about finishing the attic also. 

And who knows, he may have actually gotten to these projects if not for his untimely death back in 1996.

Our Mom maintained the house pretty well in the intervening 25 years (with a lot of help from her family and friends). Even so, we found there was quite a bit of work to do fixing the few critical items we found with inspection completed last spring, and to overall make it look “clean and fresh” - hoping that some lucky buyer is going to pay top dollar for it, since it’s really our Mom’s only remaining asset.  All of that plus just getting all the STUFF out of there, before the fixing up even started, has been an intense experience. 

This last visit to Seattle, unlike the one in March, my sister and I couldn’t stay at the house like we normally do when we go “home” because of course it’s emptied of all furniture, and my two brothers have been moved out for a few weeks now.  But we made multiple trips from our nearby Airbnb and each time the house had transformed a little bit more, and now I am seeing the final changes from afar.

Our house transforming - until it’s almost unrecognizable as ours.

Approaching Fifty, She’s Still Writing Poetry

And maybe it’s embarrassing

Because it’s not always good

But I’ve not always done the age

-appropriate things that I should

so why start now?

Refused children, developed a decent

Career despite myself, bottomed out but

Got clean and healthy, re-discovered endorphins

stayed married somehow

Maybe that’s all of my life in a nutshell

But now I read these silly 

notes from middle school, 

love letters from college 

boyfriends and air-mail envelopes 

 - par avion - from women friends 

contain adventures we had, musings, 

stories, aspirations for our lives ahead - 

lives we now live and I wonder: 

do any of us have 

what we envisioned?

Some days are dreary - 

Doing dishes, answering voice mail,

Filing taxes and tending endless

Needs of children - others are golden - 

That trip to Portugal, births and sunsets,

family and college reunions, 

A really good meal

All - I would speculate - are fortunately

pretty well grounded, but these missives

From the past remind me that

Once upon a time

We flew

https://youtu.be/LQS9vr1j06U

Break Your Heart

 

Daffodils and cherry tree blossoms

Sibling fights and realizations

Such as “our mom was a slight hoarder”

It’s so painful to still be a child

In this house and inexorably

Getting older

Efficient trips to Goodwill

In the wet weather

Slow walks to mom’s ALF

In the softening sun

Masked backyard gathering

With childhood friends

Screaming tears of laughter 

At adolescent anguish we documented 

Proves that even adult women with

invalid parents in a Pandemic can still be 

“girls just wanna have fun”

Back at 1710 the work is

Slowly, amazingly 

Getting done

One more drawer to empty 

Of its contents...wait, just one more...

How did we get here?

Are we doing the right thing?

Is there any way out of this

Other than such a scary 

final door?

As I walk and drive my childhood

City, spring arrives with 

daffodils & cherry tree blossoms

I should return “home” more frequently 

So I can break my heart more often

If that is what hearts are for

Home/This House/Family is So Sad

Home is so Sad ~ Phillip Larkin

https://poets.org/poem/home-so-sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft 

of anyone to please, it withers so, 

having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,

A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.

*************************************************

The last ornament was the Christ baby in a walnut shell. Pinning it to the tree was a task for a child, for someone credulous and hopeful, and Denise could now see very clearly that she’d made a program of steeling herself against the emotions of this house, against the saturation of childhood memory and significance. She could not be the child to perform this task.  Pg.514 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. The tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by Enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body - softer, more mortal and organic - than like a building. 

Pg.541 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

*************************************************

“A Family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.” ~ Pat Conroy

Year of Wonders

The wonder is hooray, we made it!

To the end of this weird rotten year.

For those of us who made it.

For those of us not dead or dying or

Imploding with existential dread, loneliness and fear.

The wonder is we impeached 

the president, but did not convict.

And most people, sadly,

don’t even know the difference.

I read a whole book about the first time - Andrew Johnson 

and the failure of Reconstruction - to make sure I did.

But the wonder is how no one talks about it:

4 million black men and women, freed

But not free at all - not even today.

And what it has to do with MAGA and how 

Those who are not innocent, have never been made to pay.

How none of us are innocent, but all complicit.

All persons never having been equal: the American Way.

Trump as the direct inheritor of Johnson’s

Acceptable white supremacy;

Johnson as Lincoln’s irretrievable mistake.

Horrific legacy we must face: 

what reparation can and will we now make?

But there are so very many challenges: this world on fire

And yet some still debate whether or not 

there is such a thing as “man-made” climate change.

The wonder is how long we can deny, and bury

Our heads in the sand, and pretend

That it’s just this year, somehow, and

It will be better in 2021, magically.

The wonder is clear mornings now on my balcony 

where I used to nightly obliterate and escape.

Today the sun comes up, sweet bird song 

And coffee help my soul sit down, resting

And contemplating it all for one minute...

The wonder is there seems to be an infinite 

amount of mornings just like this - until there isn’t.

Happy Winter Solstice

Although this year? I don’t think anyone will try to “keep the year alive” - most of us want it to die! And get to 2021 so that things may be better....

The Shortest Day by Susan Cooper

• And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
• And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
• Came people singing, dancing
• To drive the dark away.
• They lighted candles in the winter trees;
• They hung their homes with evergreen;
• They burned beseeching fires all night long
• To keep the year alive.
• And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
• They shouted, reveling.
• Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
• Echoing behind us—listen!
• All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
• This Shortest Day,
• As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
• They carol, feast, give thanks,
• And dearly love their friends,
• And hope for peace.
• And now so do we, here, now,
• This year and every year.
• Welcome, Yule!

https://strongsenseofplace.com/2019/12/21/the-shortest-day-by-susan-cooper/

American Thighs

staring and comparing

exact length and width

my whole life

or at least since I started 

playing soccer at age seven

such judgement and importance 

placed on the shape of sweet 

pale skin peeking out from under 

shorts, as we ran around soggy 

Seattle fields like baby antelopes 

while parents waited on sidelines 

with orange smiles in their hands

mine were never thin enough

the popular girls' were perfect

symbol of all that type of girl
had that I never would

impossible to ever be skinny or
pretty enough to be truly good

strange how they would seem

to appear larger or smaller depending

on what type of pants one wore

I didn’t wear jeans for years, tried ankle-length
dark skirts, as a teenager, to hide them

longed for a diet that would work

even my burgeoning feminism couldn’t save me

then I made a friend in college whose different

fixation also came from her sport: the shape
of torsos from beach volleyball courts

tanned bodies supple as seals
in the golden California sun

this was a revelation to me! because 

I never thought that not everyone

else was looking at, and mercilessly 

judging the same female body part

and perhaps it didn't matter as much as
I thought, maybe it wasn't the entire measure
of my worth, perhaps there was another way to
be good, and break out of that routine body 

dysmorphia that we simply call American 

"girlhood"

it's taken years but now, how I love them for their 
strength & longevity, for they’ve carried me
across so many finish lines, they've
literally never let me down

and that turns out to be all I ever needed
from them, all they ever really meant
they’ve carried me, they've carried me,
with such love, they carry me still

This Rich Life

That night we had: chicken soup
spiced with salsa, good salad
and savory spanakopita

Children on the periphery,
self-entertained and happy, just
the right amount of background-noisy

We had thoughtful conversation: why do we get
married? Reports on recent travel, and what
do we want our lives to look like when we get old?

The lighting in this photo is
terrible, but the friendship I have
with these women, pure gold

Still Judy

She thinks it's 1999

the month is October 

the President is
"that awful man with the bad hair"
It is 2019 - the month is actually August 

but she got one out of three right! 

Not long ago I read the novel Still Alice
when this disease was only 

an abstract nightmare.

Now I know about RBANS and MoCA for
cognitive testing, Financial vs Medical 

Power of Attorney...

Now I'm reading The Memory Police: 

"The hunt for memories became 

a daily activity..."

She's the one who taught me to read, to love
books as precious and magical things.

But now, for her, the words retreat
slippery fish disappearing
into dark water like a dream

like the husband and children gone
too soon, these final years come
too fast, like a whole lifetime
never happened, and yet every lonely
day just keeps happening