Readers! I made a bit of a tactical error way back when, by creating a mailing list AND a blog with its own separate list, and I have a million social media accounts I neglect. All of which is to say, forgive me if you’re getting this news twice or thrice, but eager I am to share that I have new poems out in the world!
But first…is it spring where you are? Earlier this week we had another massive storm here in northern California. The rain, a constant pitter-patter. The rain, filling up my crawlspace and dripping in my window. The rain, flooding roadways and overflowing rivers and closing highways.
Atmospheric rivers. We’ve had—seven?
And the wind—yesterday, a tree crushed the house next to the one where my band practices. I thought for sure the eucalyptuses on Albany Hill were going to come down. On Sunday, driving north from visiting family in Santa Barbara, my kid compared the landscape to Hawaii—he’s inherited my love of hyperbole for sure, but nonetheless: there’s not much golden about the Golden State these days. Everything is green.
Oh, but—the flowers are beginning to pop out. Battered, petals everywhere, but—in bloom. And we need them. With the rains have come the when it rains, it pours, adage—seems like many people I know have had more than their share of tragedy recently.
So: bring on spring. And with spring showers come…spring poems?
Then two terrific literary journals arrived in my mailbox. You can read “Frontier” in the latest issue of The Journal and “A Day at the Beach” in this spectacular issue of Ecotone.
But we’ll chat before then, I hope. Drop me a line.
And if you’d like to hear from me just four times a year, use the pop-up that appears on this website to sign up for my mailing list. That’s the easiest shortcut to my rambling newsy updates about new poems and more (I share reading recs, too).
I hope this finds you well, dry, and as happy as can be, and I send you my gratitude, as always, for sharing with anyone you think might be interested.
It would take a thousand photos to really explain a year of Covid. We had one slideshow.
New Year’s Eve, 2021. We enjoyed a Covid-style masked backyard cocktail with friends and came home for a decadent fondue dinner just the four of us. I’d thrown the photos together an hour or two before. The slideshow started with the boisterous New Year’s Day 2020 party we’d attended, traveled on through the last picture I have of my parents standing in front of our old house, the one we said goodbye to in 2020. And then my leg, all marked up with Sharpie before I had my varicose veins removed last January. Valentine’s Day (26 Valentines, glued by the preschooler, and a heart-shaped cake). The last in-person show my band played at Ale Industries. The trip on BART to I-don’t-remember-where, the kids looking hella East Bay in Warriors gear and caps.
And then, a blurry image of us and some friends surrounded by empty booze bottles and take-out containers the night they announced the schools would be closing, the last night we gathered inside with others for almost a year.
The slideshow rolled on, the photos imprecise, unstaged. List after list, schedule after schedule. One entitled “Basic Rules” (the gem: BE NICE TO EACH OTHER!!), one named, simply, “Projects.” Then, photos of said projects: “Ancient Room,” the flower-collections, the swirl paintings. The hikes and makeshift sensory table. All those days of homeschooling. The Elsa-from-Frozen dress I sewed for my four-year-old. Easter, the kids’ hair already floppy. Making jam with the last of the plums. Black Lives Matter protests, masked and distanced. I could go on and on and I kind of want to, because more than a trip down memory lane, the slideshow felt like a testimony to the difficulty and occasional beauty of a year spent completely under wraps.
This past week, the news, the blogs, and the sosh are all filled with retrospective accounts of the pandemic year, with incredibly depressing death toll numbers and more bolstering reports of vaccines delivered (I’ve had my first shot, even!). We’re headed, I think, out of this thing, and I have a feeling it will take us a few weeks, months, maybe even years to get used to our resumed freedom. Sometimes, now, when I find myself out two nights a week (a birthday gathering around someone’s fire pit, say, and an after-dinner walk), I’m exhausted afterwards. I’m exhausted anyway, let’s face it, but somehow the socializing is so novel and extroverted that it completely takes it out of me. The other night when my 11-year-old and I were discussing the great disappointment of a sixth-grade-year spent almost entirely online, I tried to introduce the silver lining: “school’s starting on April 12th,” I reminded him. “I know,” he said. “Scary.”
And I so got where he was coming from: it’s wonderful to think of life getting back to normal. Of school starting. And for a hundred reasons, it also feels scary.
On New Year’s Eve we watched a 2020 slideshow, and I decided I’m making a slideshow every year from now on. I want to remember every silly photo we took: the last of the plums, the double rainbow that made my kids grin. The incredible fall colors that showed up in late November. And the time my little one dressed up in a gold cape, a floppy green hat, and ring after ring of leis, and posed, grinning, in my bedroom, as though he didn’t even know Covid existed.
What memories will YOU take away from this year? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes. 