Phil’s arms are swollen and weepy
The dust of chainsawed poison ivy.
After a night of little sleep,
He sipped his homeopathic water
And bathed and slept
And woke to repeat.
I would wish for greater effect . . .
Except I remember that
Even allopathic drugs
Take many days . . .
If they work at all.
I had reached full stop in my efforts.
The planning completed enough,
The doing remained . . .
And the doing was not happening.
In anguish, I cried aloud to the Lord
As I drove the backroads in the fall.
A quarter of an hour,
Passionately seeking help.
The next hour: the possibility of coaching.
Something I had not really considered,
But that shimmered before me
As water to a traveler dying of thirst.
Some years, driving in autumn
Feels like driving through a pumpkin.
This year, finally, driving the back roads
Feels like driving through a river of gold.
Driving to church, almost in silence,
I admired the sun filtering through the leaves—
Fall, finally.
Time to pray, alone in the car.
Peaceful, silent.
Singing and visiting,
Listening and praying.
Then a stop at Costco, to get frozen fruit
And hot dogs.
Time to read for fun,
And jumpstart homeopathy.
Talk to my parents,
About personal things and work things.
Sudoku.
And early to bed.
Some days fly by,
And some meander lazily,
A vacation in themselves.
A Sabbath.
After a day of emotional turmoil,
I faced, at almost midnight,
A paucity of choices before bed.
Learn more of marketing.
Write homeopathy notes.
Read Northanger Abbey annotations.
Or find a book for fun.
It’s been months since I read a book for fun.
So I did.
Sammy Keyes, what will I do
When I’m done with you?
I’m fine with eliminating triggers from my diet
For the next month.
But next time, maybe I shouldn’t make
No Bake Cookies for the boys.
On a grey day with more hours of work
Than I usually prefer,
I put aside the less pleasant distractions
And spent a few minutes
In the waning light of a fall day
Jumping on the trampoline
With a grinning, laughing, bouncing
Boy, blue eyes seeking mine.
A routine trip to town:
The car ahead slowed;
A black shape ambled off the road.
Passing by a few seconds later:
The thrill of a black bear
Walking between the trees.
When the weather is perfect,
Sunny, not too warm,
It’s painful to have to go
Inside for a phone call.
Caleb practices his writing
Using the 26 laminated cards.
He wrote nine words in the workbook,
And read those nine to Phil at night.
I think he’s read a few words before,
But maybe we can call this the first.
After a day or two of feeling
Exhausted
Lacking confidence
No clarity on what to do
I antidoted the remedy
And immediately felt better.
How much I long to be a Nat mur person,
With suppressed grief as the primary point.
But I fear I may be Silica, with the inability to follow through.
In the description, not much sounds right:
I’m not even sure if I have a yielding disposition!
But I have bad nails, weak hair, poor skin, infectious tonsils.
Troubled, I went to pray on the trampoline,
Soon interrupted by a son who sought to jump.
I wandered up the driveway, seeking sun,
And laid down in the grass beside,
Kissed with the warm rays,
And closed my eyes to pray.
When I woke, renewed,
I returned to find all now at peace.
I forget
Sometimes
The relief it is to have a day
To go through papers
And clean off the counter
And make blueberry pancakes
And read a book to a boy
And dissect an owl pellet
And do a little marketing
And visit with a friend
And generally stop and catch up on life.
This is the best thing on a gorgeous October morn—
To sit in the sun under a cloudless blue sky,
Birds soaring on the thermals above,
Cats pursuing their feline business beneath.
Joe laughs and jumps and reads.
Caleb sits next to me and listens,
And occasionally practices writing.
And I sit and soak it all in.
My sad son took an Ignatia and went to bed.
He came in sobbing in the middle of the night.
Next morning, I read Winnie-the-Pooh first thing,
And he sat on the trampoline with us while Joe read,
And he had his first happy day since we returned home.
I chose to take the hour and a quarter
To watch my aunt on Jeopardy.
Twenty-five years before, I knew nothing as
I watched this as a girl with my grandma.
Today I was surprised by how much I’d learned.
I did not know everything, but I knew a lot.
A friend found several witty sections
In my book, and hoped that they were mine,
And not simply a quote from an original source.
I think we should assume that all the wittiness was mine.
Whiny Caleb, grieving his lost vacation.
Joe, ill far more often than he should be.
Isaiah, so touchy when someone laughs.
Not to mention the various relatives
And friends who I do want to help.
I cannot catch up.
Small wrong things had stacked up,
Until by days’ end I was gasping,
And the thought crossed my mind,
“I wish I were dead.”
There have been seasons
Where that was my refrain,
But so unexpected was that now,
It unsettled me.
Are the demons of the past
Always lurking?
When my sick son
Finally ate,
And all the brothers left,
We headed to the trampoline
For bouncy reading practice
In the last rays
Of a dying day.
Listening to Psalms as I drove to church,
Tears flowed.
Singing during service,
Tears flowed.
My precious friend,
Abandoned.
