Skate All the Way
Glide down the sidewalk with the metal training wheels fitted around your sneakers. The pavement is rough and the dandelions growing in its cracks feel like blubber under your wheels. Skate all the way. A slow two blocks to the park and then the two blocks back to your grandparents’ house on Robertson Road. The yellow house with the black porch swing and slick carport. Grapes in the arbor, hard and green. The house with the piano no one plays, a whole room devoted to it and named after it. Spindly brown feet sunk into the artichoke carpet. Skate all the way with your bearded uncles and sweet aunt behind you. A young aunt, a sister aunt, the baby of the family. Yo-yo in her pocket. Gum in her purse. Cassette tapes in her car. Her car is cute like a toy or a cartoon or someone giggling. But its color is serious. The green of seaweed and pines. Slow down when it comes to this aunt and enjoy her. Take in the silence of her when she reads on the porch. Watch her move through the dinner parties, smiling, in her delicate straps – a thin necklace, a dangling gold watch, the ties of her dress that make bows at her shoulders. Mouth lipsticked in desert rose. Brown eyes and pixie haircut. The kind of pretty you hope to be one day. Watch her start college, then leave a year later. Watch her move into her first home with her second husband, a man who ridicules through jokes, the stab and sting of his words laughed away. Watch her pet the cat, who will outlive her. Take in the sadness that surrounds her. You don’t know why and you won’t until you’re older and hear the talk. The past her friends and siblings and husband thought she overcame but hadn’t. Skate all the way, for now, to the playground, its equipment the same shade as the trees growing there. The playground which turns invisible in the fall, and camouflages into the brown and gold of the woods. A place you can’t see at first glance.
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I’ll Pick an Offering
Sundays are for sorry. For forgiving trespasses and forgetting whatever little arguments led us to bed in silence the night before. The words I want to say float around like ghosts in my brain all night. How easy it is to want your arms, your hands, your knuckles. Your fingerprints like signatures granting permission. In the morning, I make coffee, and you make your toast. Browned in the oven on broil. And we start over. You kiss the top of my head, and we’re careful with our words. We want to get along. This Sunday, I have work to do outside. It’s rained for weeks, and water has seeped into the inner covers of my beehives and made a mess in the top feeders. The rain mixed with the winter pollen patties I fed the bees and created an amber substance that looked like drool and smelled just as foul. It had started to grow mold. And still the bees partook. I think about these particular colonies and the roadtrip they made last spring in my car from their home on the bee farm in Virginia. That day they buzzed in their screened boxes and I played Springsteen to calm them, and it worked. I clean the top feeders and place fresh patties of food in each. In the summer, this whole yard will fill with the flowers I planted for them and for the other pollinators. Orange and green milkweed, French and English lavender, a rainbow of self-seeded zinnias, wild blue indigo, purple sage flowers, watermelon-pink echinacea. An eminence of purples. And the yellow and red tulips bulbs I planted last fall as a gift to my spring self will bud and bloom. I’ll pick an offering to bring indoors. And who knows what arguments wait for us then, what words we’ll fall into, or what compliments might remove all the breath from my body and give me a reason to hum.