But Doubtful

Dear Reader,

It’s Day 25 of National Poetry Month. I have written at least one poem every day. Not always willingly.

That wasn’t the goal anyway. The goal was to touch it: to write, submit, revise, even just think toward it. To keep a hand on the thread so it didn’t disappear into the walls, if that makes sense.

Yesterday, I gathered the poems from this month that didn’t yet have a home and gave them one. Two of them I stayed with a little longer. One in particular feels like something I have been preparing to write my whole life, though I didn’t know it until now. It will take time. Patience. A kind of steadiness I don’t always trust myself to have.

And I will have to write it without sentimentality.

Or rather, without the kind of sentimentality that smooths over what ought not be. Sorry, I know that’s vague. It needs to be for now. 

Early this morning, I wrote another poem, this one about mirrors. It’s currently a bit didactic, TBH. But that’s fixable. 

I began the day reading part of  Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes by Maya Angelou, then made what I’ll call a proper weekend breakfast: fried potatoes, fried apples, sausage patties. There’s more to say about that excellent book, and about her, but not today. (I will say this: why do so many of her recipes call for green peppers? Sigh.) 

We put out the rest of the items for Spring Cleanup after breakfast. A van full of young women stopped and took more than half of it, and I felt complete happiness watching things leave us and become useful again. They were so delighted to fill their vehicle, and I was just as delighted to see all of that go to a good home. 

We brought our kitchen chairs out to the treelawn, since we’d picked up two others from a neighbor’s Spring Cleanup pile earlier in the week. Not long after, that same neighbor came over and claimed the chairs we’d just set out.

I laughed and told her we could’ve skipped the middle step and just swapped. 

Later, it occurred to me that those chairs had belonged to her house once already. I bought them years ago at a garage sale from the family who lived there before. The chairs have made a small, quiet circle back to where they started.

I am, apparently, a person who believes in chairs finding their way home.

At some point in the day, Word Raccoon decided the porch needed to be reimagined. There was no vote.

I changed pillow shams, vacuumed the too-flat carpet, sorted decorations, and moved a number of things into the giveaway pile. I claimed the large crock as a porch trashcan (it’s so cute) and assigned the smaller one the task of catching mail as it drops through the slot. Let’s see how good our mail carrier’s aim is. 

The porch also now has a basket for the necessary things such as extension cords, chapstick, the small practicalities, which feels like an admission that this is not just a pretty place to sit but a place where I live part of my life. Where I write. Where I watch.

I’m happy about that. 

I also unearthed fall and Christmas decorations that had been lingering in corners for reasons I cannot fully explain except last year was complicated.

(Why so many, though?)

Rearranging my beach lovies: shells, rocks, sand, driftwood, makes me long to go back to the dunes. We only made it there once last year, and it was not a good trip.

The solar lights are finally outdoors again and in the ground. I hope I have them turned on properly.

The burned-out bulbs in the strands on the porch remain untouched. I’m too tired now. 

It is somehow after seven.

Word Raccoon is indignant that I have not yet written about the excellent cookies.

“Tomorrow,” I tell her.

She does not believe me. She says if I don’t let her do something properly creative soon, it will be on my head.

I am not going to be the one to tell her that Sunday will include outdoor chores and, at some point, window cleaning, if she wants to be able to see all of the lovely wildlife.

She can be reasoned with, and barring that, definitely bribed. I am the keeper of the cookies and the Coke Zero. She will obey. 

Maybe. 

But doubtful.