the last blue iris

 It is Christmas Eve, the Solstice come and gone, our tree up, the house quiet and child-less. Teen-less. My phone has pinged twice this week to let me know I was exposed to COVID while in the Denver airport; aside from the times I vomited (migraine, I hope) in the bathroom and in the plane's barf bag, I wore a K95 mask. I am vaxxed and boosted.  My son is in Michigan in a quarantined house, his stepsister with COVID but so far, everyone else okay. Her mother is a nurse, her mother loves her daughters fiercely and from all accounts is kind to J. I must believe things will be all right. Today I crocheted a hat (it isn't great, but it sort of fits my pumpkin sized head), I ran, I walked the old dog through drizzle, unlit Christmas lights. R. and I drove out to Kelley Point park, down Portland Highway past encampment after encampment near container yards, in low-lying wet places, near the road. At the park, a school bus with the side torn off, a light on, a stove; a minivan with ...

August, 2021, South Haven, Michigan I am on the back deck in Somewhere, Great Lakes America listening to thunder roll in off Lake Michigan, cicadas and katydids and crickets whir in the trees above me. A giant silver maple in the middle of the yard, young catalpa and sumac and a tree I have forgotten the name of. Hostas with giant white flowers, giant hostas;  rose of sharon gone wild, virginia creeper and locust trees and the hum of air conditioners,  mosquitoes and tiny black flies and silverfish in the bathroom. Air like soup. November 20, 2021,  Kentwood, Michigan I am again in an airport hotel room 1,700 miles away from home, having delivered J. to his father for the week. Tomorrow I fly home again, and then repeat the whole thing in reverse next weekend. I want to write but lately I feel empty, a windblown field, the way the countryside drops away doe-brown as I drive from my mediocre airport hotel to the Lake, only oaks and beeches holding their leaves, the fields ...

*  Two nights ago, I was bitten in the face by Hamilton the long haired grey cat who only visits us at night. Up until last night, Hamilton and I were bffs, and I had zero fear about picking up any cat. But I'd had a martini, but he was afraid. And he quickly bit me in the cheek when I picked him up, tried to walk toward the porch. He was purring when I put him down. When I came inside I was angry, embarrassed my feelings hurt.  Your voice changed when you told him to go , R. said. Are your feelings hurt because it was Hamilton and he was your friend ?   Leave me alone, I said. I slathered my face with Neosporin, bandaids. Don't fucking touch me. R., of course, was right. I felt betrayed, but also stupid. Don't pick up strange cats in the dark and try to kiss the tops of their heads is a solid piece of advice. I'm an idiot. Last night, Hamilton and I made up. He always comes after dark, to sit by the rat hole near the coop, comes running when I step outside and say his ...

 This morning I woke up when the dog started moaning--daybreak, somewhere between 5.30 and 6.30, sunlight filtering through the curtains. Weekends, R. and I have a deal: I let the dog out to pee when he first moans, and then an hour or so later, he gets up to feed the animals. Weekdays, I get up earliest and take care of everyone. This morning, the AC was churning and Snake, our big orange tabby, did what he always does when he hears my eyelids twitch: crawl up on my bladder and meow loudly so I will wake up and feed him.  I got up, peed, let the olden dog out, checked my phone. There, in my Facebook Memories, was a message from R. from 9 years ago, soon after we'd met at a MFA alumni conference and a) he was enamored with another woman, b) I told him I would kissed him if he asked, c)he told me I was too young for him and d)he butt-dialed (so he says) me at 3 AM the night before we all had to fly home. Anyway. I woke up this morning, groggy from our martinis the night before,...

 My parents gardened. My mother's realm was the front yard: hostas and nicotiana, impatiens and pansies in pots. My father's realm was the side yard: zucchini and tomatoes and cucumbers. As a child and a teen, I had scant interest in any of it, except the fact that when the hostas that lined our front walk bloomed, if you squeezed the flowers before they fully opened, they popped like bubble tape. Except for the tomatoes and cucumbers I would eat doused in garlic salt, still sun-warmed.  Then I got married the first time, and planted a garden in the shady spot between driveways: snakeweed and astilbe and things I can no longer remember; echinacea and black eyed susans in the one sunny spot in front of the herbie curbies (Michigan-ese for garbage/recycling bins). Then the garden on Gross Pointe street, the first house I   bought on my own (allium, black eyed susans, morning glory curling up the downspout)--garden the neighbors wrote me anonymous notes about those are weeds...

What a time this is. Tonight, I found myself suddenly singing harmony to "Amazing Grace"along with the notes that floated up from the police station near us, played on the bagpipes. Last year this time, clouds of tear gas spewed into our neighborhood from the same building, police in riot gear, police leaving the neighborhood in urban tanks toward the BLM protests downtown. At night, we shut our windows; at night, the voices of protesters rose over the breeze, then came the acrid smoke, shouting, loudspeakers far into the night.  There were no bagpipes last year; tonight, there are multiple, playing on the roof of the old safeway-become-precinct.Last summer, the pandemic was still young; we had moved beyond our sourdough starters and toilet paper shortage, to months of protests, to social unrest. Then the fires came. The skies went red, then yellow, then the entire world was grey for weeks. Tear gas and smoke, air so dangerous it was unbreathable.   Last night I attended...

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full­summer  day-- * This week the sky has been almost unbearably blue. The house feels empty; the dog waits at the bottom of the stairs, whines for a walk. But it's just me who walks him, who helps him up the front stairs, who pats his head at the end of the day. Today, R. and I spent the day at Silver Falls State Park, my small legs straining to keep up with his long ones. In two weeks, I'll run my first in-person race in almost 18 months, and it will likely be the slowest half-marathon of my life. I've been listening to podcasts while I run, giving myself permission to run as slowly as I feel like, stopping to pet each street cat, admire each garden.  * Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live...

 Every morning since the first of the year, I have tried to chase the dawn--wake up, sit in the dining room and write while the sun comes up over the Cascades, over the apartment complex two doors down, the bare snowball bush. For a little over four months, Monday through Friday (with a few exceptions), I have written in my little composition book--nothing more than descriptions of the morning, the birds, the small noises in the house. Everyone else is asleep. Or rather now, dawn coming earlier and earlier, all the other humans are asleep.  I get up, feed the dog and the cats, give them their various medicines, put laundry in the washer, feed and water the chickens, watch the sun come up and write. When I lived on Grosse Pointe street, my dining room also faced east, over the little reservoir woods. For months at a time, I would wake up, sit with a candle and my journal and write. I started doing this when my anxiety mushroomed, when I felt off center. So, I decided to start a...

Every time the plane banks over West Michigan: yellow sandy soil, grey-green haze of leafless trees, the endless blue of Lake Michigan, I wonder: is this the last time I will come here? J. is getting older, almost 16. Though: a pandemic. Though: the airplane packed for the quick flight between Chicago and Grand Rapids. Though: I wore a Kn95 mask and a cloth mask for 14 hours, listened to women next to me complain about their single-layer surgical masks, how awful they were, how they didn't understand how anyone could wear two  masks at all. Let's throw all the masks in a fire,  the man in the seat next to me said last week,  democrats made this virus . In the woods, wild onions. Beech leaves a dry, pale gold. Downy woodpecker, cardinal, nuthatch. If you stand still enough, you can hear things growing, a soft rustling in the dry oak leaves, one deep green fern emerging from a nurse log.  Boxed wine, bread, cheese, pears. Expensive chocolate.  *** The first time I...

A week ago, while deep in the brambles of working on some new poems, I remembered a journal my Aunt J had given me when J was born--dark blue, puffy silver stars, fancy thick paper. My poems are stretching into new territory, and I remembered this journal as only having one entry, roughly written a month or so after J was born, and a letter to my new child wherein I promised to see him as a person, not as an extension of myself. I thought the rest of the journal was blank--the paper was too thick, I didn't think I wrote at all for the first few years of J's life, etc. The journal was my on bookshelf, along all of the other journals I've kept: the spiral bound expensive journals from college, the leather-bound, Celtic-knot journal my first best friend Acorn gave me (and my two dogs-ago dog chewed), the multiple composition journals I have used as writing notebooks since. I pulled it off the shelf, expecting that one epistle, and instead found multiple entries in 2005--the le...

 One year ago tomorrow, I called into work with a low-grade fever, cough, splitting headache. The headlines were about the shutdown in Italy ( can you believe it? that must be so weird!).   Every time I went to the bathroom, I counted to 25 while washing my hands. I coughed into my elbow. A few weeks before, I'd run my second race of the season and actually won my age division in the 5K, something I had never done before. I had never run that particular race before, but thought: well, I've been doing a lot of speed work, let's see how that plays out if I run full out? Apparently, it worked out well. So I was looking forward to my annual 5 miler for St. Patrick's Day, then a 10K near Easter, then I would start training for my favorite half marathon in July.  Spring break was approaching and I knew my boy and I had to travel.  The first COVID case was confirmed in Oregon, in the town where I'd won my race.  Monday, I told another colleague who I knew always r...

 The closer it gets to a year, the-- what. Emptier, more wordless, more-- I got my hair cut today and could barely hold a conversation with my hairdresser, one of the smartest and most interesting people I have met in Portland. I felt-- tongue-tied, floaty, out of my body. In her yard, peacocks. Her cat as big as a small dog. Her dog a sausage with satellite dish ears. J. was with me and I had a hard time talking as we drove home.  We were out of the house, for a few minutes. Further away from home than we've been since we got back from Michigan. It was the first non-family, non-zoom-work/opera board/therapist interaction I've had. the first in-person interaction. I still feel like I'm the tin man, like I no longer know how to move in the world. It's almost spring here--song sparrows are singing, towhees and jays and juncos are making their nests and little clouds of lesser goldfinches swoop over the earth. The sweetbox has bloomed, the edgeworthia, now comes the daphne...

 Yesterday J. did the math (i.e., ask Siri) and figured that we've been in quarantine for 349 days. My Zoom profile pic is from March 13, 2020, and my hair is short, I am wearing makeup, I look...well, a hell of a lot younger. Though none of us really knew what lay ahead of us, and all of us were still alive then, I felt on the precipice of something. Though two weeks seemed a long time to pause the world. Then a month. Then here we are at the edge again.  In this almost-year we have had fires that blotted out the sun for days, made necessary the wearing of a  precious N95 mask the only way I could go out to feed the chickens. We've had clouds of tear gas and weeks upon weeks of protests, police brutality. I've been to family court twice ( I'm blowing this all out of proportion! etc etc). This is all in the tail end year of the Orange Dictator's rule, and then came the Insurrection. We are a week past a snowstorm to end all snowstorms, here and across the country an...

We consider it eternally boring when we talk about the weather. Small talk, what we do when we're trapped with folks we don't care about, Sure is a nice day, isn't it? Snow coming soon.  In Girl Scouts, we learned all about the clouds, how they can predict what's to come. Mare's tails and mackerel scales make lofty ships carry low sails. The way you can smell rain, or snow about to come. As a child I learned that tornadoes--that scourge of the Midwest--sounded like freight trains, and, living a block away from  the Burlington Northern tracks, shoved my fingers into my ears humid summer nights when heat lightning and distant thunder flashed outside the window, convinced we were going to float up into the clouds, or the walls cave in. In the winter, we would step outside and know immediately: snow was on the way. The light in the morning was lemony, the air smelled crisp had hard edges, the sun, even in a clear sky, always seemed wan. Seven years ago, we landed in Por...

 Yesterday, I fell down a rabbit hole and traced my family's ancestry back 12 generations to 1321 in a small town in Wales. Son of--son of--son of-- Included in this bloody stagecoach that points dead west (I write, while sitting in my office in Portland, a few hundred miles from the edge of the continent) are some knighted folks in the 1600s, a Reverend in the early 1700s, Jamestown settlers, a doctor who built a plantation in Rutherford County, Tennessee, his son a Confederate Colonel, a professional football player, a professional baseball player, dirt poor farmers, an Air Force pilot who died in WWII, and my own family who got planted in Chicago when my grandmother, who grew up on one of the Rutherford county properties, married a Yankee and moved North. Look up the family history of a white American and it seems likely you'll also see a history of Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, blood upon blood. I think about the times in grade school when I would proudly pipe up with ...

I took the dog for a wet walk this afternoon, the sky low and sopping, a fog obscuring the top of Mt. Tabor. Hell, it's 4.45 when I write this and outside it's already pitch-black, everything wet, everything dripping, the chicken run a morass, the yard a morass, everything mud and slick. The dog wears a raincoat, a fat raindrop plopped right behind the lens of my glasses into my eyeball. There were hummingbirds high in a tree, crows streaming to their nighttime roosts, the neighborhood flock of robins that visits every Christmas making their evening calls in some birch trees. R. and D. are in R.'s office playing some space-themed computer game, laundry churns in the basement. My backpack is almost packed--masks, hand sanitizer, a change of clothes,  my laptop, various chargers, a few granola bars--and my alarm set for 3.30 tomorrow morning.  In around 48 hours, we'll all be home again, though J and I  will quarantine until we can get a negative COVID test sometime early...