Bubble an' Squeak

It is October and the trees shake their arms in grief - or maybe fatigue. The leaves shatter into red, yellow, orange, and brown fragments. I watch their pieces whisk up into the air, swirl in their last dance, and settle on the path. My broken, little pieces are also there, dancing and spinning with the leaves.  Each night, in the wee hours, I sneak out into the street searching for and gathering the pieces of me back up. I am there creeping along the dark paths, scooping the pieces of me back up into my arms to put myself back together for the next day.  Back at home, in my office, I stand in the soft light balancing each piece carefully on top of the last piece. Balanced. Glued. It is the secret work of late nights. I toil away as quietly and secretly as possible. And I try to carefully put myself back together. And I secretly try to be whole. I would like to wear a sign warning people: Fragile.  Please, do not breath too hard on me. I am ever so fragile.

I have spent the summer reading a whole book about the Heart of Yoga.   I have learned many things. Mostly I have learned I will not become a yoga guru. I will practice yoga. I love yoga. I understand it better. Aaaannnddd, it was not the answer. My mother, if she were to read this would say, "That is because you are a Catholic, and you cannot pray to Aztec gods and expect answers. I told you this last week." (For the record both my mother and I know that the practice of yoga is not related to Aztecs. My mother says things like that for effect. It turns out, we are related).  Rather than circle back to my Catholic upbringing with all of its corruption and misogyny, I have turned to the Buddha. Again. I have yet to accumulate evidence where he is misogynistic. There is time. So, I have replaced The Artist's Way, and The Heart of Yoga , with Being with Busyness.  To celebrate I took photos of sunflowers in the morning-post-rain sunshine. Celebrate is a strong word. I a...

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263) Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind — By Emily Dickinson I told the truth, but I told it  slant . Raised always to be a good girl, go to Church, take the Sacraments, be a good student, work hard, study hard, pray hard. The reward for all of this was a completely miserable existence. As the years dragged on, the truth was so bleak, I told it, just slant.  If I could make my story happy, it would be happy. Writers say the story is all in the way you frame it. Maybe if I slanted the truth just enough, twisted it in the light like a prism - just the right way, the truth would be a rainbow emerging from storm clouds. Shattering the darkness. If I laughed a little, and twisted it just a tad, and then a tad more, the clouds appeared to blow ...

 I have always wondered why my grandmother died. She was dead long before I was born; my dad was just two years old. His father, his brother and his sister were left on the farm in Northern Maine to fend for themselves. Dad tells me stories of sitting on the floor of the tractor with his brother. Dad was the brake, Clayton was the gas. Cindy was up top steering the tractor across the fields to help their dad, shouting commands at her two younger brothers. There are whispers in the family about her death: A hysterectomy gone wrong? Something about her lady parts? Had she lost another baby? These mysteries are bound in the recesses of time, lost to those of us who stand before her black and white photo and wonder, who she was, and why she left so early. It seems the women in my family have had hard luck with early deaths, and desperate lives. My aunt Cindy went on to see her father remarry and bring three more children into the family. My Grandmere loved them and raised them all - to...

The Strawberry Moon is waning, while the Buck Moon hovers in the-not-too-distant July, waiting his turn. The elk seem to know their moon is rising as they wandered down the Spring Creek Trail Monday morning. I had a chance encounter as I ran by, turning my head at just the right moment. Two buck with their velvet antlers lay in the bright, green grass. It is a rare treat to see elk in town among us city dwellers with all of our noise and oblivion to the furious beauty of the summer. They twitched their ears at me as I snapped a quick photo.  Nic says I cannot describe Nature in terms of gentleness and peace. I cannot say, “The gentle warmth of summer.” He reminds me that the natural world is a brutal world where most animals die terrible deaths of great pain and a lot of starvation. I must be a realist and accept this reality. That guy kind of ruins the metaphors I churn up, or the symbolism I try to pull out. Summer is boiling by at a speed I don’t really appreciate. We are past t...

My construction paper sign waves sadly in the wind. The yarn clumsily pokes through either end of the paper and tied to the lowest branches of the tree announced the only rule in our club: No Boys. This is a convenient rule as there are no boys to be found to belong to our club of 3. I secretly want boys, but our brothers are all too old to be part of our club, and there are no other boys in the neighborhood who are acceptable.  The Pensingers  - the boys across the street - are too young, and our family is fighting with them because they gave us a bike and then took it back. As a result, we are forbidden from speaking to the Pensingers. Are we forbidden? I can’t remember. I know we don’t speak. Which is a problem because I am still secretly in love with Jared, Pensinger #2, Please don’t tell. It is embarrassing because he is much younger than me, which makes my crush so weird. But love is love. I can’t help that I love him. I think my sister suspects my crush, which is why sh...

 It was all so different than I expected. I found your broken heart. I found it in the neighborhood tiny library amid trashy romance novels, and strange self-help books. It was stashed in the back behind some canned food. Curious, I picked it up and watched little pieces of your heart fall out into my hands. I didn’t expect your heart to just crumble when I opened the cover. I expected it to hold itself together a little better.  I put it back on the shelf, but I put it in front of the canned food, in case you came by, realizing it was missing. I was sure you were coming back for it. No one just leaves a broken heart on the bike trail.  I turned my purple running shoes toward the trail and trotted off - leaving the bits of you there.  But I kept thinking about them. Who leaves their heart in the tiny library? Who lets the whole world, or at least the neighborhood, see their messy, broken pieces?  Did your heart break and someone else picked up the little pieces ...