Endings

I hope your holiday time was spent well.

Christmas brings love, and love brings sorrow with separation. That is the price of love. Grief and solace, joy and sadness- it is all wound together like a skein of yarn.

Some gifts of love fit and some have to be grown into, or passed on to a more deserving person. All recipient categories require an element of grateful tack.

The need for sleep can ache. Listening to a sick child heavily breathing can lull you to sleep or be just be enough to keep rest from reaching you. So much holiday sickness paired with the time reserved for home with no extracurricular commitments go well enough. Just not three years in a row.

What will this year bring?

1. Firsts

2. Lasts

3. A multitude of middles

First airplane family trip, first movie theater experience as a family, firsts for Eli in young mens. Lasts are more sneaky- like fading light. I would not have ever guessed that I'd not see Florence visit me, nor lose a expectation so raw and personal.

Remedy for pain: poetry, gobs of it. I perused four anthologies amounting to over 900 poems. I picked one for each month to learn by heart for my heart.

Not in order:

1. By an inkling

2. Mary Oliver

3. Nature poems for each season : surprisingly Emily Dickinson wins with most frequent poet this year

4. Shakespeare

5. Browning claim February

6. Lullaby

7. Silly

8. Freedom for July

9. Stars get a poem