Month: December 2020

Where have you been, my darling young one?

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And just like that they’re gone again, my daughters.

You’d think by now I’d be used to the Wednesday evening departures, leaving my house with the same great gust of energy that they arrived with last weekend. Taking with them their dimples, rosy cheeks, the better half of my heart.

They’ll be back again, of course. On Sunday. But by then it will be a New Year. What if everything changes before I see them again? What if when the ball drops to the empty streets in Times Square (thanks to Covid-19) some great shift will occur? Will they be the same girls I said goodbye to in my living room? My arms wrapped around them, their arms at their sides, too old, too teenaged and beyond to hug me back.

They will.

We all will be the same. And yet, somehow, in the cold breeze of anticipation, it feels like things might be a little bit different…

Happy New Year, Loves. I’ll miss you.


[Title borrowed from Bob Dylan.]

“There is no going back to where the river used to be.”

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In the winter of my college sophomore year, my then boyfriend wrote me a poem,

“Here in this December gray
a moment of cornflower blue,
I just want to give a bit of yourself
back to you.”

A love offering of my favorite crayola color. I felt so seen. Thirty plus years later, I finally feel the same simple confirmation.

Here in my yellow kitchen, I watch and I listen. Melting snow sounds like paper crinkling as the drops fall onto the deck boards. Starlings peep and flit about in the woods. I am by myself, but as Luke Brindley sings out from the speaker on the counter, “I am not alone.”

Four Januaries ago the sight of a log frozen in the river brought me to my knees. It was a symbol of my spirit–trapped–in a life that was keeping me from my true self.

I am freed.
I open the window, breathe in the cold.
And it feels good.

(Title borrowed from Luke Brindley. I hope he doesn’t mind.)