the sun was shining on their faces

there’s this sleeping giant in me called writing that’s been sleeping way too long. 

The flag was still this morning and it made the air look bigger, like right from the pavement to infinity the air is all one. It’s the same hazy morning expanse that connects to other countries, other cities, other rural towns. It makes the world seem smaller and everything a lot more important.

Today I sat through a beautiful class,
beautiful because it taught good things
like the connection between mind and body
and how we should take care of ourselves.
Beautiful also because a beautiful woman was teaching it,
one with a big heart that’s open and bare and
brave enough to be those things.
The class was good but sitting in my desk chair with wheels
I started listening to ourselves talk, instead of just listening,
you know, and realized the rhetoric. I realized we have support groups and plans, training sessions and classes, resources and lectures,
videos and medicines, all because we are dying
and sick because we eat too much. It’s become a disease
and people focus their whole life on how to avoid it.
Back home when I was alone my defenses broke.
I realized we were sick, I was sick and then I got it
and I felt shame burn me underneath my skin.
How can it be that we are dedicating our time, our lives,
on resolving the issue of people weighing so much 
when other people are dying because they have nothing to eat?
I can’t stand the shame and anger now, it’s pulsing in my head and it isn’t fair.
It isn’t fair, what has gone wrong with us that the world has come to this?
Sure there are scientific reasons and genetics and medical persons
that would have an explanation but my heart doesn’t listen that way right now
and I’m beat.  

Me hace falta, la perspicacia de sus mentes en el momento menos esperado, la vacile de una idea, el regocijo de una broma, el esbozo de una sonrisa…

It’s that kind of morning. I was sitting at a stop light in a car and looking up up, way up a hill at a red barn, settled in a brown field. The doors were open and cows were moving towards it, around it, along the sides of it, minding their own business. Just then I didn’t want to be a business woman and sit at a desk and look at my face in the rear view mirror and see business casual—a tiny bit of lipstick. I wanted to be that girl in an over sized coat, cheeks pink from the cold, frost coating the ground— not cold enough to freeze the mud underneath the old yellowing hay. That’s where I very much want to be this morning, smelling animals and feeling that all is good in the world of cold gray mornings and hungry mouths and freezing fingers.

Tonight I thought I heard the frogs creaking the rythmic song
they do only in the spring. It was wishful thinking 
cause all day I was reliving that time of year 
and walks and sitting outside to watch the end of the day. 
Walking home made me see though
because the silence was very much winter.
I still felt my spirits up, unseasonal, since that pressing between my ribs 
hasn’t been felt in such a long time.
I’m so glad when it comes 
“Suprised by Joy” is was C.S. Lewis says. He has such a brilliant way
of putting things. 
Anyway
Joy I just wish the whole word could know it and for once
stop the ache and pain, that they would go to silence,
winter so that spring
could bring the creaking frogs 
time with people on a porch,
so they would know hope is real and feel the swelling in the inside
when there’s an uncanny, unseasonal removal of weight. 

I was going to write a post about honey “spluttering” until I realized that although in fact a verb, “splutter” denotes more of a sound than an action. According to Merriam-Webster it means “to utter hastily or confusedly”. Perhaps this definition can be stretched to include the sound a honey bear makes when, 1. it needs to be cleaned because its blue cap is smeared with leftover drops and wisps of honey from the last time, and 2. it is squeezed hastily. So the honey spluttered today onto my white turtleneck. Just a shiny amber blob that I was rather reluctant to wipe off. I felt it was a sort of hello from the honey. 

Perhaps it is time to go back to work. 

It’s good to get out in the world, in the mornings. Realize you’re not the only human on the planet whose head feels fuzzy and whose eyes freak out at the morning sun glaring over the trees. It’s good to get to work and realize there were people who got there before you. Going to work in the morning makes me have sort of a brotherhood feeling with fellow man, like we’re all in this together. I want to smile at the man picking up trash in the parking lot. And then sitting here in the mornings I think about my town, it’s easy too looking out the big glass windows onto the parking lot, the streets, and the bank. It’s my community, part of my responsibility; I have to take a bit of credit for its existence. I can’t shrug off the people that I see walking in the cold, their breath coming out in white puffs. And the woman yesterday that asked for help, her arms wound around herself like a shield, she came to us as sort of her last resort. What do we know? Just people that because of a couple words typed on a sheet of beige paper we sit on the other side of the desk, the swivel chair and computer side and listen to her problems like we can fix them. Can we? Aren’t we just like her? Aren’t we different? Because we wear black slacks we should know more. Because our bank accounts have more zeros we’re better off. Why? I couldn’t really say. But her problems aren’t going away just because she goes out the door and back into her rusty car to drive away. She’s still part of the community. I’m part of it too.

there are never enough forks

black trays even appear

through windows oh

I’m sorry!

would you like that 

heated? 

you’re coffee’s out and

where is your decaf? Well!

I want regular

coffee turns cold too fast.

Couldn’t find their number and

it’s too greasy.

plastic forks are bad but 

resting

on the counter is even worse. 

Light or medium

dressing? —it’s all relative. I’m sorry

did you say olives?