In The Week Before T-Giving

I am going to be thankful for things every day:

today, i am thankful for the following:
1. these ridiculous children -- and their ability to think i'm great and magical even though i'm not.
2. fridays
3. record players
4. my book club
5. a three day week next week
6. music--oasis and ingrid michaelson on repeat
7. poems

Girl on Sunday

She held a yellowed leaf above her head,
like an umbrella, on a sunny Sunday morning
dancing to the beat of stop-and-go cars
and flickering traffic lights.

There is no one in the world but her
and she is frolicking in an April storm.

She jiggled down the street,
knees like doorknobs,
and I watched, aghast at how
little there was to worry about
on a Sunday morning.

I had woken up and breathed in the air,
knowing this would be the last day
when it was too hot for the heated house
in many months. I woke up wanting

desperately to cherish the sun
and the color. Soon it would melt,
like gruel in a pot, like over-mixed paint,
to a gray, greasy, ice-splotched winter.
I took a walk, hoping to remember

the smell of fall, and the reason for love.

Instead I found that girl, impossibly
unaware, imposing in her hopefulness
already looking past snow leaking into
the tops of boots and toward squeaking galoshes.

Only the delicacy of youth
would look forward to the rain. And only I
would wish for a little less wind on a day
that shouldn't have happened anyway.

Just Being.

I went back to Beantown this past weekend--for the first time since I left it. I was nervous getting on the plane, worried that I, and the people around me, would be too different, that things would feel weird, that I wouldn't understand or they couldn't anymore. I was bringing C with me, worried that he might not like them. I was flustered about getting judged, or judging. I was extremely scared that people would not understand.

I was wrong.

It was amazing how easy it was to simply be.

Sometimes, I wonder if I should be there....