through Cumberland Gap
we drive down to Tennessee
and stand in three states
it’s been many years
(the gap between visits here)
and everything’s changed
Pappy’s room is new
with the antique furniture
from their grandparents
a whole new kitchen
to fill Donna’s empty nest
with the light of love
this generation
will take the time to teach them
and fill in the gaps
they’ll learn who came first,
what they fought for, what they lost;
close gaps, open eyes
Kentucky River
holds the morning cliff paddle
(limestone for horses)
you can’t find this view
west of the Mississippi
(where it’s drought, drought, dry)
here? just paddling
along the river, the creek
till you find yourself
you might find turtles
(soft shells, even, a bonus)
as you move along
just like the sliders
they slip into the water
hoping for the best
tractors welcome here
along these hilly horse farms
(barns worth more than homes)
you’ll rarely pass cars
as you meander back roads
in this life cycle
you might find castles
hidden in the morning mist
waiting to fill you
locally grown food
waiting at a king’s table
between life cycles
don’t let the rain win
it’s a porch-swing afternoon
filling this cycle
i can’t capture this:
the words, the joy, the city
it’s all in this swing
i can’t capture them
filled with adolescent angst
yet so forgiving
a summer road trip
(there’s not without one)
they live it, breathe it
i can’t capture stress
it won’t fit in this market
nor on this road home
the sound of leaf breeze
is impossible to miss
from the top? perfect
there’s just nothing like
five giddy little-teen girls
breathing us all in
our poor Daddy
outnumbered seven to one
without one complaint
handmade arts and crafts
working their way through college
the way it should be
artisans, trees:
intertwine their native souls
to make Earth special
Kentucky kayaks
have defined my sister’s life
this past fifteen years
through all the algae
fighting through climate crises
we keep paddling
life is a rope swing
make a running circle out
and don’t hit the tree
those just-jumped-in grins
can win our independence
from a dark future
June: a harried month
with all the joys and sorrows
that make up this life
You came to me in the hallway of a school that I had mixed feelings about on a night in mid-December that I had mixed feelings about (I’m a teacher, and I was annoyed about the timing), and your tone was a little bit too grateful.
Is it possible to be too grateful?
That mid-December night was before the pandemic, before the isolation, before I even knew your name. And you put your hands on my hands and your eyes on my eyes and said to me: “I just wanted to thank you. Because your daughter saved my daughter’s life.”
They were in seventh grade (one of the worst grades). And I knew you meant it, though my shy child hadn’t even mentioned your daughter’s name at the dinner table.
Yet.
I want to tell you now, on your fiftieth birthday, that I can’t buy a decent gift other than this silly gag gift for your stock-tank “pool” and soon-to-be six-person hot tub. I can’t photograph “The Lovers” or paint “The Fly That Looks Like a Bird in the Sunset Scene” with acrylics and talent like you can.
But I can write a thousand words.
And I’ll try to make them worth as much as a picture.
The picture of you with your hands on my hands. Of you sitting in my backyard for a thrown-together fall party around the Solo Stove, then going home and buying one and giving ME credit for the idea. Of you trying to hide behind this tree, because you don’t want your dreadlocks, your beautiful dreadlocks, to outshine the flowers.
(This far along, I don’t know if I can limit this picture to a thousand words.)
Of you in that bar/laundry-drying front room with the original-owners’ Nebraska-farm barnwood walls bearing down on us, when you poured out your whole soul with a sip of bourbon, with a sip of trust, and trusted.
Me.
And I listened and tried my best not to take sides. And my husband said, “But why would she choose you? You’re barely friends.”
But you chose me, in that December hallway, in that barnwood barroom, in that part of yourself, to be your friend.
I want to capture a picture of how much it means to me to be your friend.
Of you, who I can text-rant, text-cry, text-breakdown until the ultimate five minutes of three dots and a, “You want to come over?” invitation when I’m already in my pajamas, leather moccasins and all, and there’s no question that Rosie is going to sit in my lap and your daughter is going to make me dinner and your son is going to praise the concoction of meats and cheese he created and Guy is going to entertain us all with his stories.
On a Monday night.
Of you with your hands on my hands, your eyes on my eyes, your heart on my heart, telling me not to cut the strawberry stems, warning me about the upcoming winter storm, teaching me and all your second-graders how to garden. All your COVID-traumatized second-graders who you did nothing but publicly praise and nothing but quietly worry over and save.
A picture isn’t enough. A thousand words isn’t enough.
Because you–I–can’t encapsulate, in a blog post or a birthday card or a gag gift, how much you mean to me.
You once sent Lilly on a trip with me in the middle of a lockdown. You praised me on social media because my packing list required three masks. I drove the five kids–Lilly, Rio, Mythili, Naomi, and Fabian–to three campsites in as many states, took them on a pontoon, on a series of bikes up the Sun Road in Glacier National Park, on a reservoir along the Snake River, into the depths of Wyoming gun country, into the depths of Montana right-wing ignorance, and you?
You were nothing but grateful.
To thank someone whose ideas are crazier than hers? To hear that voice that you’ve heard in your head your whole life but now has vocal chords and that beautiful face?
I can’t tell you what it means to me.
It means more than that moment when you told me that my daughter saved your daughter from the bullies that epitomize seventh grade.
Because we are fully-grown adults now, and those bullies still bully on the other side of those barnwood walls.
Yet.
You are too grateful to be bullied. As is she.
And you put that light in her and that light in my youngest and that light in the world, and I wish I could paint it. I wish I could pick up the brush and choose just the right texture, the correct mixture of pale blue, soft white, maybe a shade of gray, and be that painting that belongs on an easel first and a living room wall later.
Because a picture is worth a thousand words.
And there will never be enough words, colors, hands, or hearts to describe how much you mean to me.
Happy birthday, Tonja. Thank you for taking your hands into my hands, my baby into your home, and my heart into your heart.
Dear Fabian,
I wish I had something to say to you to encapsulate how I feel right now. But the main thing I want to say is that you came into our lives at one of the most difficult times of our life, and because of that, I don’t feel that I could give you what you needed. My three daughters, but especially the older two, have been experiencing major mental health issues, and it has been very difficult for me to witness and alleviate. It has been a major strain on my own mental health.
The pandemic truly exacerbated all of this and made my job more challenging and stressful than ever before. With Izzy moving away to college, I feel a great sense of loss. And Mythili is so depressed that she doesn’t even want to consider college or find joy in anything anymore, which also weighs heavily on my soul.
I wish that you had come into my life at a different time and that I could have helped you more. But I feel so strained with my mental capacity, and I became so frustrated with your lack of motivation and adamancy against learning English and focusing on school that I couldn’t focus on anything else.
I still believe that you truly have the potential to be much more than what you give yourself credit for. You had the tenacity and courage to leave your entire family and homeland at a young age to seek an opportunity, and I hope that one day you will truly take advantage of it. If you don’t finish your education now, I hope that you will in the future after a few years of working tirelessly. I hope that you will one day have a family of your own and give them all the things you couldn’t have when you were growing up.
Mostly, I hope that you will look back at your time with us as a lesson. Not a perfect lesson, not a painless lesson, but a lesson. Everything happens for a reason. Someone left their job as the Newcomer teacher, and I took the job, and that same year, my first year, you came into my classroom and told me your story, and I wanted to help you, and I tried my best. I’m sorry that my best wasn’t good enough, but I hope that one day if someone stands before you and offers you all that we have offered you, you will work one hundred times harder to show how much you want it.
Speak the words, one at a time. Study the lessons, one at a time. Make small goals, one at a time.
Love yourself, bit by bit. You must start with that. Just take everything one day, one hour, one moment at a time, and you will find yourself a brighter future.
I will always love you and hold you in my heart, and I am sorry that it must end this way. I wish nothing but the best for you, and I hope that you don’t completely cut me out of your life. I want to hear about your successes, your failures, your loves and losses… your life. Because I want you to have a good life.
Love,
The Mama You Didn’t Want (But Needed)
Step Write Up 