Your Serving Wench

After they die, I crack a cold, cheap beer and comb through my belongings.  I look for letters, text messages, facebook comments and photographs.  Listen to voicemails to see if maybe, somewhere along line, they’ve left me the gift of their voice.

After they die, I scramble desperately for something left of them.  Something tangible.  Something physical that I can hold inside my hands.

When I…

There was a pair of house finches building a small nest outside our window. I’d watch them weave it all together—the female, with her muted brown feathers, working relentlessly on her art. The twigs meticulously placed, one over the next—how they intertwined with one another. The male, with his bright cherry red head and breast, supervising.

When the winds came strong, it fell. I watched them…

On a Hot Tin Roof

It’s taken me now just about a month to come up with words to express my feelings of our time. I’ve thought about it a lot—nearly endlessly, to be honest. The words I would normally write feel cheap—because it hasn’t really gotten better, certainly not for many of us. And it might not get better soon, certainly not for some of us. And so, it is no longer an intellectual challenge for me to…

“For a moment, I expected the impossible. And then it happened.” Where are you?

Wild winds whipping up against a desolate landscape. Cold skies and a raging heart. You have been uprooted. Torn from the comfort of the ordinary, you have been exposed.

But do not go blind, little dove. Look around you. The air is clearing. There are dolphins swimming through the rivers inside Venice. There are people…

There are still things inside the world to bring astonishment.

The first sip from a cup of coffee in the morning, while you watch the dayglow filter through the window. The way that someone asks how are you and they really mean it. The eggs that I collect, each morning, from my chickens. The weight of them inside my hands all their shapes and colors. My sister’s face, and her laughter, the way she…

The right amount of sadness

I spend nights alone, in a hotel room.  Sometimes in a cabin in the mountains.

The cabin in the mountains, they’ve done up so that it’s covered in deer prints and wolf prints and bear prints and plaid.  Enamel crockery.  Indoor hanging vines.  Big picture window, so I can stand naked and cry before the world.

In the bathroom, a neat and tidy bar of soap.  With lavender, unused.  I don’t use it…

The way the calls come late at night, and the way that you don’t sleep.  Lie staring at the ceiling; know that you must leave town in the morning.

The way you need to buy an apple pie for the drive. Let it sit upon your lap the whole way home.  You don’t even like it all that much, the pie.  But you need the warm flaky crust, the baked apple, the smell, sitting in the front seat of a car. …

Boys don’t cry

You want to rip your hair out, over and over again. You want to tear at it until your mind grows quiet with exhaustion. Until your scalp, with a suddenness now feeling cold and empty, grows tired.

You want to cry them back to life, as if your tears have hidden power in their flowing. But the water is done. It does not come as it once did and still they have not returned. You thought you had more…

An aunt of mine makes quilts, for every generation of the family.  When we are young, she shows us ours—the patches for each sibling.  I remember being worried that my brother, newly born, did not have a square.  Worried he had been forgotten in the weaving all together of a family.

I watch the grown ups ooh and ahh over the quilt.  In her grand performance, she unfolds and holds it up before the…

I’ve hit a wall in this exploration of family.  I think it comes from the fact of my youth.  So many of their memories I can’t remember, which makes me feel like I am not deserving of their story.

I am leaning on my grandmother, likely more than she knows.  I am relying on her to share the moments of their lives with me, so that, maybe, I can find some understanding.

Tonight, on the phone for…

I remember the back of my uncle’s head.  The smell of the cigarette he smokes, wafting through the window.  His red neck in the driver’s seat my knees brushed up against the back.  Going somewhere, as a family.

I am starting to make promises to God and placing strange things that I find upon the floor into my mouth.  A thumbtack, a button, a piece of yarn.  I wish on them, and roll them all about…

It feels strange, to wake up in a world without them.  A sudden stark realization that they are, simply put, no longer there.

And yet, we transition.  This is the work of the mourners—to ease themselves back into life.  The men continue on, their emotions dragging them so deeply that they touch the bottom.  The women, well, we try to gather up our men from where they’ve sunk.

Their fingers plunge…

Like water, the brothers uncles cousins now slip through my fingers.  And where they fall is someplace dark.

I cannot quite see to the bottom of them.  I try to peer through all of their existence at my feet, to grasp at understanding, but my gazing comes up dry.  To really understand them, the dead men pooling at my feet, I must dive in.  I must enter.

This I do in phases.  In meditations from…

I try to think back on when I first fell in love with water—fell in love with storms.  I think it was, perhaps, the whimsey that my father breathed into the lore—the way he made rain seem like magic.  How he never made us come inside once it’d begun.

With water, I have a strange relationship.  Far too often nearly drowned off of the California coast, the ocean is some 17th century romantic…