strength
SkyView
She’s Off
the break feels shorter
as my oldest leaves again
bavk to college life
The Scrapping-Together-Book
so different from your sister's when i spent many joyful hours piecing together the photos of her youth your youth is marred, robbed, broken and i don't know why i don't know why and it might be the not knowing that will take us both
Not Here.
If you had another job, you would be so annoyed by the coworker who couldn’t piece together fiber or the project manager who doesn’t know how to manage, and your day might be temporarily ruined. You would miss your lunch hour redoing someone’s work or you wouldn’t be able to tell your boss your exact opinion of his golf vacation in the midst of your short-staffing issue.
If you had another job, you would spend your lunch hour cutting fibers or sending emails or catching up on a spreadsheet, hoping for a break or a promotion or … anything else.
Anything but this.
If you had another job, you wouldn’t stop in your tracks in the middle of a lesson to let a severe-needs child work his way to his seat, an admin begging you to give him a pencil and a blank piece of paper because maybe if he could draw a basketball, he would stop rocking on his heels and shouting the word across the room for all the world, all your classroom of recent immigrants, to witness.
If you had another job, when the siren makes your phone and the PA system and the whole world bleep and vibrate, you wouldn’t be thinking about the announcement (seeking the nurse) at lunch. You wouldn’t be sending your middle daughter to investigate the health of your colleague whose life was already threatened more times than the number of weeks in this school year, only to hear this report: “There were people everywhere and a kid on the floor. The security guards were surrounding the whole scene. We couldn’t see anything.”
If you had another job, you’d see everything. The botched fibers. The boss’s vacation. The spreadsheet that tells you exactly what you’ve done right and exactly why you don’t belong here.
But you don’t have that job.
You have this one. And despite the pull of this dog lying on your calves with the persistence of a love so divine you couldn’t measure it, this morning or in any other moment, you are here now.
And you look at your refugees and think about the Afghan girl and the Afghan para, who both stood on that tarmac eleven months back in a country that will no longer allow them to attend school, let alone show their faces, and are up in the tech office trying to get a new computer while you stand here, trying to explain without Dari or Pashto words,
“It’s a lock… out. There is a problem outside of the school. Not here. Do you understand me?”
And all the while you are thinking about your colleague whose student yesterday held a girl at her throat and sprayed her with dry erase cleaner, now imagining that at lunch that kid was under the security guards’ hands, and that he escaped, and that he “is a suspect in the perimeter.”
And that your colleague could be gone. And that your daughter was braver than you, walking down there to report on truths that can’t be reported.
And that you have to teach a lesson about the BE verb and all its uses and “Yes/No” questions such as,
“Are you happy?”
Yes, I am.
No, I’m not.
And the boy who can’t read or write or take total control of his body won’t stop talking about basketball, and then soccer, and then eating, and his paraprofessionals finally come, and the Afghan para and the Afghan girl return unscathed, and when you look into her young and beautiful eyes and ask her to say, in Dari and Pashto, “Please tell the students that the danger isn’t here. It’s a danger outside of the school,” they all shout, “We understand you, MISS!”, and even after her translation, her reassuring interpretation of your words,
You’re. Still. Not. Sure.
And let’s make contractions out of these “Be” verb conjugations, my students! (He + is = He’s. You + are = You’re.)
If you had another job, you wouldn’t have to wait until the passing period to see the text from your threatened colleague.
“I’m OK. A kid passed out in my room during lunch. I don’t know about the lockout.”
You wouldn’t have to wait. You’d be sending emails, repairing fibers, or working your way through a mountain of paperwork.
You wouldn’t be standing in front of these kids who are trying to piece together the parts of a sentence and the parts of their lives that were left in another country.
You wouldn’t be you.
If you had another job.
Road Trip 2022, Day Eleven: Cades Cove
a magical place:
the only way to describe
these teenage smiles
even pup loves it
cycling past wildlife
below the Smokies
where can you see bears
and collect salamanders
under the same sun?
this mountain-framed pic
taken on the same soil
twenty-three years past
we’re fatter, older
while the mountains are hotter;
such is life—sad changes
yet look at our girls
fearlessly taking this on
one moon-wing a time
Road Trip 2022, Day Eleven: Cades Cove
a magical place:
the only way to describe
these teenage smiles
even pup loves it
cycling past wildlife
below the Smokies
where can you see bears
and collect salamanders
under the same sun?
this mountain-framed pic
taken on the same soil
twenty-three years past
we’re fatter, older
while the mountains are hotter;
such is life—sad changes
yet look at our girls
fearlessly taking this on
one moon-wing a time
Road Trip 2022, Day Six: Sincerely Cincinnati
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
Breathing Through
June: a harried month
with all the joys and sorrows
that make up this life
A Thousand Words
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.
Step Write Up 