Category Archives: Parents & Children

The green marker dries out
while I’m adding his varsity tennis matches
to spring vacation dates written in pink,
blue for music lessons,
purple for soccer league,red for band practice,
bright orange for prom,senior trip, graduation.
Here they are, the last few months
of color-coded life.
When this last child leaves for college,
the decades of multicolor
kitchen calendars will be over. His and hers,
games and concerts, practices, lessons,
rehearsals, field trips,Done.
I try to remember life with a one-color calendar,
and something shifts in me—-
like the way your mind turns
when you try to read about
Parallel Universes and realize these
scientists are serious, are truly asking
you to consider this possibility.
And I can’t say for sure what this feeling is–
Only that it is huge, like another universe
waiting behind the one I’ve walked in all these years.

are crowded with artifacts.
The robin’s left with one strand of tinsel,
some dried grass, and a scrap of blue silk ribbon.
I get soccer cleats, Legoes
and the ruins of a medieval castle
built entirely of sugar cubes.

Some daughters drift away. Like fog, there then
lifting then gone. Others need a sharper break.
Something swift and cold and painful.
Every girl has her way of learning to leave.
Fits and starts. Till they can walk
away and back again,
grow confident that after every turn
towards home or away
they can turn around again. This takes so much practice.

We spent last weekend, mother and daughter,
doing nothing much. In sweaters and soft socks.
Ice cream for dinner. Cafe breakfasts with friends.
Popcorn and old TV shows. Mostly, music playing.

All night we heard crashes outside the windows.
Icicles, built over long winter weeks,
melted and fell from the roof.
January thaw. In the morning, for one day,
we could see the grass again,
so green and welcome I wanted to cheer, to bend down
and kiss all growing things in thanks,
for the reminder that this frozen world will pass, in time.