the last blue iris

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...

We drove from Portland to Seattle, walked through two colleges, one urban, one treed and full of enthusiastic undergrads. We ate at a vegan restaurant, we slept in a fancy Marriott hotel, we talked about music and art and then, when we got home, we bought wax pastels and mixed media weight paper, and talked about what to do when friends self-harm or we are afraid friends might self-harm.  We made three laps through Pike Place market, watched the sun set on Puget Sound. We saw Mt. Rainier shift through the clouds. We ordered burritos in the hotel, coffees in the morning. It has been sunny and cold.  We walked around the University of Puget Sound on Friday and I stopped being able to feel my legs. He slept on the ride home from Tacoma, and all I could think of was all the times I drove with him asleep in the car, in his carseat, or in the back seat, or with the seat flat in the front. Home to Michigan from Minnesota or Wisconsin, or Illinois while my folks still lived there or m...

It is coolish and breezy, and the sky has gone pearlescent, bushtits and finches and chickadees busy then quiet in the cedars. What is cool in August is different than what is cool in April or October. The  air smells like glorybower, someone barbequeing, dry cedar duff and dry earth, and earlier my hands smelled of crushed tomato leaf, begonia. Sometimes I think how did I get here, 45 and half a continent away from home?   But what is home? I am reading Louise Erdrich's The Sentence  which feels different and beautiful for Erdrich, and I am homesick for the Midwest, the white pines of Michigan, the two-note song of a Chicagoland cicada, the waters of Lake Michigan this late in the season. Mosquitoes and blackflies. Air so thick with humidity it feels like wet wool, like another skin, another body on your body. I am homesick and then I am not, for my home is here, salal and fir, cedar and problematic glory bower, sky crowding with crows as we move toward sunset, the Perse...