Hello dear ones,
I am happy to report that this week has been much less physically painful & my vertigo has improved tremendously.
Though I’m grateful for an easier week, it’s been a weird one. We’ve been dealing with a big leak in our home that flooded the closets in both bedrooms. Our space is disheveled. Askew. Things out of place. I’m not an organized person, but trying to be more of one. All of the boxes & drawers & crates are out of the closets & I feel the spatial glitch.
Also, there is just so much heaviness in the world. I feel like my heart is stretched to capacity. I know this is a privilege, to experience suffering secondhand & decide to take a break from the news so I can digest it & come up for air. Still, if possible, I believe it’s necessary sometimes.
My cousin’s wedding is this weekend & I’m very much looking forward to a big love-fest & watching the light slip into September as windmills wave to me from miles & miles of farmland. We’ll be in west central Illinois, where my Dad is from. I feel that land in my bones. The black soil. The sun as it drifts below the horizon at the end of the day seems to linger, painting the fields gold. The emptiness of the prairie is still so full.
Thank you for accepting this brief letter. I’m going to share a poem I wrote earlier this summer after visiting my Dad’s hometown for the annual Strawberry Festival. I wrote it from the doctor’s office. This week, I nestled back into it.
Please do take care of yourselves & of each other. Please let pockets of rest heal any weary part of you & pockets of joy keep you afloat.
Until next week, here’s a poem,
Annie
***
Go on
When the days offer
one tragedy after another,
I will remember my nieces
deep in a game of faeries
on the first of June
in our grandmother’s garden,
where I used to play with their mama:
a potion of hose water,
rose petals, & ferns—
plush grass giving underfoot.
“Wind, whip up!” says the six-year-old,
whose long brown hair
is catching copper
in the evening sun.
Her spell binds
dimensions together:
her double helix
a ladder across time
to a cleaner, more loved
Earth. I must believe,
above all things, in this
strawberry dusk—in her
possible world.
Annie-gram 7: Go On