Walking between the sea and the sky

The wind as her breath

Whenever I walk through tall grass---whether it's the dunes close to the sea 

or the dry hills out east, it seems that this grass is the fur of some huge animal 

who carries me without complaint, who bears my small weight with patience.

The privilege of being here together

A girl and her dog

Four days after the equinox

and dusk takes a little longer to dissolve into darkness; the air is full of familiar scents 

and every few feet I find myself entering still another memory of another spring.

The ten thousand sorrows, the ten thousand joys:

My sister has a farm:

I fall somewhere in between

I like the way my Mom and my niece seem to share an understanding of the world while 

I float somewhere in between them, feeling neither young nor quite ready to be old. 

The afternoon was a movie that went on and on, the film never slipping off the reel.

Clutter surrounds us

and some days are long and exhausting but there's also the light

that falls on my girls and the dozen or so dun-colored birds who flit 

through the pine, shaking the needles with another sort of brightness.

Sometimes, we go way out of town

What we uncover and what we hide

My heart as a camellia:

I'm spending my days (and nights) with a fourteen year old daughter and find, much to 

my surprise, that there are certain predilections and longings that we hold in common. 

She is standing at the beginning and is eager to embrace her loves and impatient with 

required pursuits. Perhaps because I'm at the place in middle life where one starts to intuit 

the end, I share her ardent temperament. Nowadays, ours is a household acquainted with urgency. 

Everywhere I go,

I find little altars piled high with our unspoken desires.