January 31.21: Coping

The vendor vast

in winter blue,

we see self-serve

is nothing new.

 

 

Thanks yet again to intrepid photographer S.W. Berg,

tromping the beach in January cold.

January 30.21: Coping

Grandma’s kitchen clock

ticked crisply like a snare drum,

by day blended in the rhythm of work,

by night echoed

through the bedded house

while the rite of springs squeaked under me,

percussive, brassy,

objecting, it seemed,

to my child’s weight.

A bare light bulb

dangling on thick black cord

hovered

over the bed,

beyond my reach

even when I stood

jiggle-kneed

on the jello mattress.

Grandma reached up

and turned it off herself,

then slipper-padded out.

Her bedroom a whole dining room

and kitchen away,

sly-eyed shadows deepened

around me

in borrowed bed

where once my aunts were little girls.

In the sleep breath of her house,

Ivory soap.

Now, as COVID blurs days into nights,

and nights into days,

my clock ticks crisply like a snare drum.

 

 

January 26.21: Coping

As you know, dear reader, I am an introvert. I love quiet. Forever the firstborn, I play by myself contentedly.

However, I do not crave a hut in the desert or a cave hidden by vines. Which is what this COVID thing is beginning to feel like.  After a while, even an introvert feels the tedium of her own company. Then a terrible thing happens: she eats. Why is it that eating is the antidote to tedium? While I ponder the answer to that, I eat some more.

Yesterday I caught myself headed to the kitchen again and gave myself a stern talking-to, made a right turn and headed upstairs, where I plunged into no one’s favorite project: culling the past.

I come from a scrapbooking family, and I followed that tradition, starting in grade school. I am not talking about those tidy, starched, color-coordinated Martha-Stewart types of scrapbooks, but the old-fashioned kind, with real scraps, bits of life as it was lived. Messy, haphazard, in a rag-tag glued chronology. Just like life.

I attacked the scrapbook that held the years from college graduation to marriage, 1966 to 1971. There were strangers in there, but the strangest one of all was me. Have you met your young self recently, dear reader? Did you recognize each other?

If you are now your young self, just file the matter for future reference, when your seasoned self happens upon you. And may you meet in a kinder time.

 

 

January 19.21: Coping

What refuge

on a thin wire

that so many seek it?

What life

in a huddle?

When frigid waves

lap quietly

at our lives,

and a winter sun

makes the barren bright,

what warmth

in the insidious cold

is really creeping numbness?

 

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.

 

 

January 17.21: Coping

The committee convenes

in officiousness large,

each of them sure

someone else is in charge.

 

 

January 16.21: Coping

A chip used to be

what isn’t there,

something lost,

leaving bare

a little bit

of what’s left,

remainder

with less heft

perhaps, but

less is more:

what isn’t there

is its own lore.

 

 

January 14.21:Coping

The precarious known,

the thatched belief,

swayed by life,

like twig and leaf —

when bared to talon,

gale and cold,

will it crumble

or will it hold?

 

 

January 9.21: Coping

Beneath fur and feather

it’s hard to judge pallor:

which will prevail,

discretion or valor?

 

In my pursuit of whether Shakespeare should be credited, I encountered a statement about things that annoy Shakespeare scholars.

I must say that Shakespeare scholars are easily annoyed.

January 8.21: Coping

A reflection, dear reader.

Today I turn 78. One becomes reflective when one turns 78 in a year of chaos and disease, when fear and rage, loneliness and grief dominate the human stage. But I was born into World War II. How can I not ask if anything has changed?

Food was rationed, bloodshed headlined daily newspapers, freight trains crisscrossed our lives carrying tank parts and spewing cinders, radio was high-tech, my mom and grandma walked to the corner store, a can of bacon grease ennobled every kitchen and bobby pins every dresser. Coal shoveled into furnaces. White shoe polish a household staple.

You have met my cell phone, humble flip-top that it is. You know it stopped working last month and then mysteriously started working again. Then, a couple days ago, it developed new problems. You may congratulate me vociferously: this time I did what any kindergartener would have done and googled the wretch. I learned that the trick was to put the phone into Airplane Mode and then toggle it out again.

Dear reader, who in the name of heaven would have the least inkling to do such a thing by way of problem-solving? I was irrationally proud of myself and at the same time miffed that I live in a world in which my life experience and hard-earned education seem useless.

As you know, this week has been hideous here but obviously something this mortally serious doesn’t just happen out of nowhere. And so I become 78 in a country with its principles in tatters. In a world where I need to know about Airplane Mode to have a working phone.

I have decided to look at it this way: 78 candles is a lot of light.

 

 

 

January 6.21: Coping

Comes now night’s black broom,

sweeping citric glow

over earth’s long arc

into some tomorrow.

Two planets meet the while

in astronomical collusion,

appearing in a oneness

of ballyhooed illusion.

It isn’t the conjunction but

the difference that’s grand

between what we can see

and what we understand.

 

Thanks and congratulations on capturing the Conjunction to S.W. Berg.

My apologies, dear reader:

the Conjunction faded in the transfer

to my blog. I hope you can see it!

Although this post is coincidence,

I cannot help noting this is Little Christmas.

The tradition of the star may not be universal

but human searching surely is.