“She left her mittens in my kitchen, not intentionally, and only after depositing a box there as well - a birthday present. Now, as evening deepens into that peculiar type of solstice gloom, both terrifying and uplifting, I continue to pass them, neatly stacked on a folding chair, as I go to the sink. To me, this is what it means to have a community of neighbors, so comfortable with each other, that her last text read: “keep them until I come to exchange them for the bread pan”. After nearly a decade of long, silent years in rural isolation, this small interaction brings my heart, achingly, into balance. Maybe now I can accept, that there is a force of peace, all around me. Not coming from where I sought it to be, but where it was always residing, hiding in plain sight. I don’t forget Bill, whom I only got to know, because of my generator woes. Just think, if I’d been able to imagine more, & create more, out of those midnight calls, as my power system failed and my batteries died. I know I’m not the first one left behind by children launching their lives, & husbands moving onto younger or mercenary women. Parents becoming infirm, unrecognizable & disabled, complicated family dynamics never designed intentionally to harm, or exclude, but that did anyway. Just think, if I’d been able to reciprocate Tania’s selfless offer, to help me talk, when I was unable to utter a cohesive sentence. There are times in life, when you just can’t. You can’t rise to your own spirit of generosity, or lift a finger to help someone else. No, not until you’ve played out your hand in the ditch, in the gutter, in the doghouse. When all your other “friends” have disappeared, as if by evil decree. Well, I hate to be overly dramatic. No one likes a drama queen, but they do like songs & poems, that speak to their own bad experiences. And so, if only that, we can carry on spinning yarns of tremendous injustice. Of the vast chasm that opens, eventually, after all that darkness starts to lift, rising, wordless, in one gigantic, unseen chorus of climbing tones, undoing, flying in the face of the machinations of doom. The box, deposited on the butcher block. The unspoken agreements of trust, throwing our lots together, for the better. Our thirst, our worst, our shining cities of huts and fires, built on nothing but foibles & illuminated, upturned faces. The birdhouse, the vase, the pillows, the wine. The grinder, the shop vac, the hours of barn board cut into beautiful mosaics, of Tartaria, squash soup, banana bread, and cash. A simple plastic tool that carries sheet rock, or tee shirts, or phrases that honor, and lighten me. For, I’ve been there, and back, and like you watched souls lift from the confines of their bodies, in a flock of swallows, or on the winch of a sturdy truck, delivering power, uncoupling what’s been tied to the wrong places, for the wrong length of time. And disregarding right or left, or trans, or the misinformed, I reach for you in every moment, on every wavelength, on every unplowed corner or smart city, or abandoned hoop house, left to flap its plastic in the wind. We are the alone ones, on a planet of boxes. Forever unwrapping, forever ready to be honestly, revised.”
