In honor of Mother’s Day this weekend, Prodigal Mag is hosting a series honoring our mothers. Today I contribute with ”When I Become a Mother,” reflecting on my close relationship to my mom and how my  desire to be a mom has changed since she passed away in January.

P.S. My Prodigal archives, and other posts remembering my mother.

Today I’m guest posting over on Lore Furgeson’s blog Sayable. Have you gotten to know Lore yet?  She’s a great writer, designer, and all around wonderful and generous soul. She’s doing a brave thing and taking the entire month of May as a vacation away from the internet. Could you, could any of us, go a whole month without it?! I think the only way I could follow through with that is if I were stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway, in her absence she has enlisted a group of her favorite bloggers to share their writing to keep her blog alive, and I am honored to be counted among them. So here’s my brief story on grace, “When You Can’t Unbreak the Plate.”

P.S. My guest post archives, if you’re interested.

Here’s a fun and bookish project to try out : make poetry from book spines! I stumbled across the idea the other day, and knew I just had to go home and make my own attempt. The hardest part? Finding verbs to make it read more like a poem than a list of titles.

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Yesterday was the perfect kind of rain. The sky was split between sunshine and storm clouds, and while neighborhood children still played on bicycles and swing sets, those clouds broke open in a downpour and everyone got drenched and no one cared. They screamed with delight and I couldn’t help but stand on my porch and get drenched with them and watch the rain and sun collide and make everything glisten. It was a happy, warm rain, the kind that you can dance in, the kind that feels like a relieved exhale. And I exhaled with it.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend and happy reading :

“And I tilt my head and re-read my life.” The realism behind optimism.

“What’s in a year, you say? An eternity on one hand, and a single moment in another. That, and the worlds between.”

“What the fine art market shows us, though, is that real value isn’t created by this volatile fame. Consistently showing up on the radar of the right audience is more highly prized than reaching the masses, once then done. This works for every career, even if you’ve never touched a brush.” – Volatility and Value. See also : A talisman for our times.

The Dirty Secret of Language.

“But take solace in what unites us… all of which quietly collide one word at a time.” – Life of a Writer.

“Sometimes they ask how I continue, and I reply, glibly, ‘Because of contractual obligation.’” – The Agony of Writing.

A fascinating look at life alone.

Editing giggles.

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My early evenings after work and before dinner are usually spent alone, waiting for my husband to get home from his shift as a security officer. It’s the perfect time of day to be alone, I think. The day’s tensions slowly release their grasp around my shoulders, and I can cleanse myself of it all with a book and a glass of wine, or with my writing, or in doing the thing I’ve been meaning to do – tidy my side of the bedroom, change our sheets, clean the kitchen.

In the quiet, I resist the twinge of loneliness, the urge to turn on the radio or watch television. If I wait long enough, let my ears adjust, I can hear the world unwinding with me. Our apartment sits near an industrial park, just past a busy highway and on the edge of a forest preserve. The trees muffle the sound of trains and planes and cars so that I can hear birds going wild with the sunset, calling to each other at the end of the day as the sun slips below the horizon.

That sound, of birds, of rustling leaves, and that light, the long shadows of a day at its end, always reminds me that I am never alone, and the words of Mary Oliver and Walt Whitman meet me in that place of brief and whole contentedness…

by Walt Whitman

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me — he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed — I too am untranslatable;

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;

It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air — I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;

If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;

Missing me one place, search another;

I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

 

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