the last blue iris

 In so many ways I have built the life I have always wanted: I come home to a safe house, my child is content in his life, has a community (stayed out far past midnight at a park watching bats darn the sky near the river with friends); I sing, I am doing theater again, I run--though less than I did. Summer is starting its long, slow lean toward fall. We aren't to the hottest parts yet, but the lawns are all yellow and the light is pink at night and baby orb weavers have begun building webs everwhere. I walk down the stairs with a spider stick each morning, carefully unknotting one end of a web from one side of the stairwell, letting the little orange spider clamber into the rosemary. An  hour later, the web is back. Some are slung twenty, thirty feet above the street between the deodar and the yellow cedars.  In three weeks, R. and I head up the mountain to write. I love that week, our world just river nad tree and scree and words. In less than a week, I need to put down ...

 When J. was young, and I was still teaching, summer was languid--long hot days in our little Moorish apartment or in the house on Grosse Pointe, cicadas and humidity, trips the Lake, long hours we spent simply being with one another, hot and sticky, pointing the hose at the dogs, lying on the basement floor while tornado sirens wailed over the green skies. There were also those nights that J. would be at his father's where I would drink myself into a stupor, sit in my office or the little front porch or at the dining room table watching evening seep up from the reservoir woods, write poems or blog posts, so deeply sad and lonely but also free. Then, I often felt guilty for the few days or hours that J. would be gone and I would be young and free. I went on dates, or spent the night with various boyfriends, went to movies or played poker with H. and D. I knew none of that would be possible if I had J. all the time, but I wished for it desperately. Summer was a stretch where he was ...