the last blue iris

 A quiet Christmas. I've been sick with covid since the late on the 15th, R. was too but is better. J. has avoided it, praise goddess, and D. just came home today, me fully masked. I feel fine now, but the virus seems pretty complacent to hang in my bloodstream. We are supposed to fly to Albuquerque on Wednesday to see my inlaws, but I'm doubtful I will be able to go. The olden dog, who sent us to the emergency vet last weekend (me sick as hell with the virus, but masked and worried) and who has apparently some kind of a mass on his liver, is home and seems his normal self. He is 16.5 years old and has terrible arthritis and dementia, but is beloved by the cats and J. and seems determined to live for another 16.5 years. Today is blustery and cold and my walk left me pink and wet and numb. It is three PM and already getting dark. We exchanged gifts in the dim light of the Christmas tree, the boys retreated upstairs to their rooms, and I'm back in my office working on the bac...

We are halfway through our run of The Sorcerer  with the Light Opera of Portland . Next week, I start rehearsals again with In Medio . Tonight is Halloween, Samhain, All Hallow's Eve. This morning the sky was red. Yesterday the wind whipped through the Gorge and tore every red leaf from the dogwood behind my office. Hummingbirds still visit the feeder three offices down. A week ago I watched a bald eagle pull a harassing bird out of the sky and disappear behind the factories along I-84 and the Columbia River. When I was my son's age, I knew I had a few true loves: music, theater, and books. At 18, was in my first college play, being the church accompanist to Our Town . I hadn't been an unnamed character since my freshman year in high school. This time, 28 years ago, I wanted to transfer, to be a playwright, or something other than what I was: a little college freshman from Chicagoland drowning in Kalamazoo. Soon enough--through choir and theater and the Women's Resource...

Some nights--oh, most nights if I'm honest--I hold whole poems or essays in my head but cannot bring myself to write them. Here, or in a draft, or in my little composition notebook. I feel like I haven't written in months, feel utterly estranged from that part of my life. Am I writer? who is she? I drive through  the city on the way to rehearsal, rain pummeling my windshield, downtown Portland flickering across the river. I sing, I put on my costume, I come home exhausted, unable to sleep. J. continues to figure out his young-adult life. I drive through the wet city, uncertain where to turn and on the wrong bridge. Is the Steel  Bridge north or south of the Burnside Bridge? Does Naito Parkway go all the way up or? Am I in the bike lane or am I in the right lane? I read my tarot. I listen to a colleague talk about another colleague's recovery from COVID--a miracle. I tear up as she explains it. Am I an atheist? Do I believe in any god? I  see every fellow Leftist take a si...

It has been a difficult autumn, full of unbloggable things that aren't my story to tell. And there are things in the world that are unbearable. But there has also been beauty. I run through rain, and then unexpected golden afternoons. My boy brings me and his camera to the little mountain, to the woods, to the Rose Test Garden and the old money neighbhorhoods around Washington Park. We walk, we cry, we talk. I have never been prouder of him, nor more heartsick.  I wake up most nights drenched in sweat; J.'s cat has taken to meowling loudly while she brings his discarded  socks down the stairs, or dirty laundry up from the basement--until now, she's been mostly silent for the first 13 years of her life. She yowls and then drops the sock beneath the Chinese cabinet in the living room. When J. is here, she wraps herself around his legs. I spend my days at work, then at rehearsal for the opera; this week, I started having double rehearsals for the opera and for the chamber choi...

The neighbors behind us--famous for growing the largest pot plant (protected by an all-winter long 20 foot tarp tent), for coughing up said weed in regular painful hacks, for a barking dog, for a vibrant raised bed of vegetables visible from our second story deck, an occasional baby, a fortieth birthday party with balloons and clinking of glasses, of parties that always involve a little fire and are always quiet by 10 PM--are having band practice in their garage. They are, thankfully, quite good. Often, one of them will sit in the yard after work and play the acoustic, sing a bit. Today, it's the full band--electrified, drums. It might be band practice, it might be a house show. It is the last warm days of summer, already dark at 7:45 PM, the air cooling rapidly from 90 degrees to 73 to 50 overnight. At night, the cats curl on the bed, and the dog moans himself into a little half moon on his bed on our bedroom floor. Ground yourself, S. Remember the world, the tiny orchard you plan...

 Today, my boy moved into the dorms for his freshman year of college. It has been a long and hard week, of unbloggable things, and I have been worried beyond my skin for him. He has had to carry so much in his 18 years without a lot of opportunities to be himself. I have held him like I held him as a baby, let him sob in my arms, promised him I'm not going anywhere, we  aren't going anywhere. This is always home until he chooses it not to be. He is six miles away, at a dream school, the kind of school I went to. We walked through the art studios today, the music practice room. Met his roommates.  I know. I am not special in this, nor unique. Kids grow up, grow away. This child has been the project of my life, the through line that has kept us both afloat, my love for him, my fierce determination to build a better life for us. I did not know myself until I had him; I did not know how to say no , or even how to say yes.  I knew how to be something for other people, som...

(August 10) A month ago, I cut off all my hair. Or most of it. I plan on cutting the rest of it in another month, before things start up and the churn of academia begins again. In a week and a half, J. leaves for college. I am not sure I can talk about this yet. I am not sure I can think about this yet. Today, at my annual pap smear, my midwife (whose youngest is also heading off to college in a few weeks) fist bumped me and said, Girl, we did it. On our walk today, J. and I saw a leucistic heron or a great egret floating above the neighborhood. The olden dog snuffled through dry weeds, the dog we adopted when J. was barely two, in my little apartment in Kalamazoo. Then, my hair was short too: a friend had cut it on their porch after a particularly ridiculous breakup, when I'd run to E. and K.'s because I knew it was safe, because I knew they--my queerest of queer friends--were my people in a way other folks weren't.  I didn't feel safe enough to grow my hair out until ...

It is a beautiful summer night, in this first summer in 9 years that my boy has been home. He leaves exactly a month from yesterday for his freshman year in college, his stepbrother a month after that. I have a hard time thinking about what comes next, what it means to be a sort-of empty nester, though I have had some practice each summer for the last 9 years. I cut all my hair off last week. I applied for a literary grant, am getting my materials together for a moon-shot teaching gig which I am absolutely not famous enough to even be considered for. Academia is--I'd say weird, but really, it is likely normal--but because I was a single mother, because I have had to support my family and work as an administrator and have not had the opportunities to take on visiting professorships, go to writing retreats and conferences and network and put my resources fully toward publishing and establishing myself in the poetry world (three books notwithstanding), I am a fringe candidate at best....

It is hot. The neighbor is in her small garden, hair swept up on her head, the sky a haze. Behind us, a group of lithe young women have spread a lacy tablecloth over an ancient wood table, cleared their yard of weeds, are barbecuing and drinking out of red cups. Each of them in a shirt that barely skims their ribs, their taut bellies golden in the evening light. I wonder if I was ever that lithe; certainly, not that free at twenty four or five, or thirty, or ever. By their age, I was married, and if I am estimating them younger than they are, then a single mother. I am feeling uncertain about my body, about aging, these days. Some nights, I'm thrown awake by a hot flash soaking through my pajamas. When I was checking out a gardening book from the library on Monday, the clerk looked at the book and said "I should probably get into this eventually. That's what older people do." She then said she was turning forty soon, but clearly saw some chasm between her and me. I am...

Friday before Memorial Day I left work early; even now, there is guilt. A small lingering fear I might be caught out. And yet, while I was there, campus empty but for a few staff, a few dedicated math students in our lobby, I could barely focus. Department meeting, discussion of AI, walk to the pond to see if the heron was eating the newly stocked steelhead, watching clouds skiff over Mt. Hood. This is the first summer I do not have to fly my boy to Michigan for 10 weeks, that I don't have to spend a weekend in an airport Doubletree Inn. I never have to do that again: rent a house by Lake Michigan, spend a few days, a week, something --running and walking and writing and drinking wine--while my boy stays with his father. Will I ever see Lake Michigan again, from the Michigan shores? Suddenly, I am bereft. Suddenly, I am free. In two weeks, my boy and my stepson graduate from high school. My mom and sister and brother in law and in-laws and maybe my boy's father will be here. Th...

Monday, March 27th  This post is nine and a half years in the making. It is almost impossible to write, my mind skitters off, as it has much of this great year of change, from saying anything. Perhaps out of superstition. Perhaps out of terror. Perhaps because I can hardly believe we have arrived here, in this place where my boy is almost a man, where we get to become in charge, fully, of our own lives. For nine years, J. and I have traveled across the country so he could see his father. I imagine I am supposed to see this as punishment. Punishment for leaving at 29, moving into my own apartment. Punishment for leaving again at 36. I have known punishment for almost 25 years--for existing, for having an opinion, for desiring anything at all. But this has also been a kind of punishment for my boy.  I cannot bring myself to calculate how many trips, how many miles, how many thousands of dollars. Maybe someday I will, but tonight, in that liminal space between dropping J off and ...

Thanksgiving Week, 2022 I have been writing this post in my head for days now--three days walking and running and hiking through the beech-maple dunewoods, the small herd of white tailed deer meeting me at every turn in the trail, chickadees and titmice and bluejays, downy woodpeckers scrambling up from each high branch. How do you say goodbye to a place that formed you, that has been my place of exile for nine years while my boy sits silently at his father's house? How do you say goodbye to the woman I was when I first came to Michigan--eighteen, so desperate to matter I could barely see straight--at forty-five, the checker at Meijer hitting the I acknowledge over 50  button without even blinking when I scan my bottle of wine? When J. and I started to do this, I could barely stare down nine years--for nine years we would have to haul ourselves cross country multiple times a year, be hauled into family court, spend tens upon tens of thousands of dollars (we've probably spent up...