a.rose

Have you ever seen a bird fall?  How could it be?  Sleeping, waking, flying, soaring, waiting for that perfect lift of wind - how do they calculate where it will take them? What do birds know of physics and calculus, what do they know of the length and arc of a curve as expressed in a breeze of wind, what do they know of gravity?  I think without words, and without numbers, they know it more intimately than Newton or Einstein. Maybe the world is ordered in numbers and solidified in the words we use to express them, but maybe birds know something else. I watched a bird last night.  His wings spread wide, held aloft by invisible strings.  I wanted to touch, to feel, to experience it with him, but I could not sense even the breath of a breeze on my face.  It was magic, maybe, and I watched him, brown against the darkening sky. I watched his wings, while up he went and down, over this way and that, turning, turning, turning, following an undefined, unrestrained...

It was deep in the midst of strawberry season, let's call it the second week of June.  On a bright Saturday morning, or perhaps a partly cloudy Tuesday afternoon, or sometime like that on a day in the second week of June, I was picking my strawberries.  I was picking them in the usual way, that is to say my usual way, which is to say I would pick strawberries from one section, and then scoot myself over and begin picking a new section.  Is this the usual way?  I assume so. I had just picked one section entirely bare of strawberries, and so took the next step in the process: scooting myself over.  I had scarcely done so, when upon looking down again I realized that there had been, all along, hiding delicately underneath carefully poised leaves, more strawberries than I had been able to see from my previous position. A bounty of strawberries in what I had naively assumed to be a completely picked over and now barren section of plant.  What fool I, to thi...

 I was the woman with babies and children.  My own babies, her children, your babies, their children. I held them and loved them, put them down for naps, changed their diapers.  I sang to them and read to them and played with them and wiped their tears. I took them to the park, the library, the pool, the store, drs appointments (mine, theirs, ours), and gave them rides here, there, anywhere - my kids and your kids and their kids. And then, I guess you know what happened next, it's the most basic storyline of all, they grew up. My house emptied out. And do you know how many ghosts haunt a home empty of children? Your children stopped coming over, and my children left too.  Backpacks with lunches and homework and little pieces of me walk out the door every morning, and  I realized one day that I had died.  That the woman I had been was gone.  But it wasn't a physical death, or even an emotional death, and I'm not sure there is a word to describe this kin...

  I shivered inside my layers as I pulled on my blue rain boots with the bright pink flowers.  It is cold in the rain today, but he doesn’t care. He is a dog. He prances through the rain and the mud the way only very small and very fluffy white dogs can. I sidestep worms, chased out of their thick brown homes to die calmly in puddles under the umbrella of the thick grey sky. I could say that this walk was awful, but I wrote a poem in my head as we went. I could say the walk was awful, but the poem felt like kissing you. I would write a whole story based on this character, if only I knew more about who she is.