Emma ran out onto the screened porch Wednesday night, green spiral poetry notebook in hand, to capture the oncoming weather with words. Dinner was ready, and then it was shower time and bed time, but she begged to be excused. Poetry earns a pardon around here.
An expection,
a whisper—
the air is tense.
Trees converse in nervous murmurings,
The white of heated iron
is in the wind and sky.
The heavens give a gusty sigh,
The earth rises up to meet it.
Trees seem to bend to the will
of an unearthly being.
Waves of the sea are in the land,
invisible yet.
A breath, a blow
scattered here and there.
The forests are found in contemplation,
wondering which of the green giants
will be the first to relinquish their glory.
Pine boughs are curving up
reaching skywards,
hoping for hope,
wishing for something to wish on
and dreaming of something—anything
to dream of,
For their fate seems decided.
Certain branches are stretching out,
unfurling their ravenous claws,
because these trees only live
for the blackened, sinister skies
of cruel, dark eyes
and innocent cries,
For a storm is coming—
tonight.
When I’m grown up and married I’m going to have two horses, a white one and a dappled grey, and three dogs and a garden with only pink flowers and maybe purple, and I’ll have three curly girls named Nora and Faye and Nellie and they’ll wear white, and I will too…
So go the ramblings of my thirteen-year-old daughters, the stuff of their dreams spilling out with the joy of beauty and the lives they hope to lead. Anyone who can remember thirteen knows this: they are dead serious.
I know I was. I was determined to live loveliness and poetry, and hang everyone else. What was this adult pragmatism, this worry over bills and mortgages and disease and all the rest? All that was spoken in Charlie Brown’s teacher-talk.
My girl-dreams were woven with books and old houses and walks in the woods and songs about love and magazine pictures and, I think, TV. There were the Bradys and then the Cosbys and Keatons with houses always tidy—all those kids didn’t even bring in backpacks from school and dump them on the floor. Their hair was forever brushed, and they were snappy dressers with no problems that 22 minutes couldn’t neatly solve.
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The Spouse has gone and gotten himself a fancy job downtown writing for the folks who make fizzy black water, leaving me at home to shoulder the load of kids and carpools and trips to the grocery store.
By three days in, we’d run out of milk and toilet paper.
Funny, because I’d prepared for this week like a Boy Scout, I thought. For some reason, in my mind, the Spouse’s drawers needed to be cleaned, his car, his closet. Off he went before dawn Monday, freshly brewed coffee in hand and crisply pressed handkerchief in his pocket.
It wasn’t until the other night, when I was giving Sadie her bath, that I fully realized how upside down and topsy-turvy things had been around here before The Commute. There were days, too many of them, when I couldn’t tell if I was my husband’s helper—or he was mine.
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