moment

rose in cut glass craves earth,
but stiffened with her moment,
she iridesces, velvet and moist,
welcoming the penetrating gaze
until she is permitted to drop
petals by threes and fours,
weep sap, and melt clumsily
into the warm, loving ground.

limerick

Chloe, Chlo-A, Chloetta
likes her mother bettah;
her father's no grinch,
but in a pinch,
her mother can knit her a sweatah.

Riddled

It's the earth's back yard.
It's a bug light for meteors.
It's the blushing cheek of God against the breast of Mother Earth.
It's a soul vault.
It's the mind that conceives sunrise and sunset as a full circle.
It's the air mountains breathe.
It's the abyss over which we hang by our feet.
It's the reflection of a puddle.
It's a big, blue cross hanging over a downtown intersection.
It's the fabric you can puncture, but never rend.
It's straight-pinned to railroad tracks
and tattooed to oceans.
It can't come in.
It threads itself endlessly through my squinted eye.

Our 96 year old house after the first day of snow. We got about 6 more inches after that, and are due for more over the next 24 hours.

To the soundtrack of a Charlie Brown Christmas

I figure I have, at most, three viewers. Hello, love of my life! Hello old flame, whom I wish lived about 2000 miles closer! Hello rare and precious friend.

I am excited that we have been buried in snow this week, necessitating a rugged and heavily clothed approach to Christmas preparations. We have been doing some fairly glorious sledding. I have gathered most of the items from which the magic will be spun on Christmas eve. I have begun to anticipate the smells of Christmases past as I make my family's traditional dishes, and also to anticipate the children coming downstairs after Santa comes, their squeals of delight and their happy faces. It is one of those times when everything comes together despite the gaping holes left by the absence of loved ones, despite the emptiness of the religious overtones, despite the commercialism. What is left, after all these years, is the joy of seeing my children believing in magic for a day. It is also the precious gift of remembrance, the smells that take me back to my Grandmother's house, the ornaments I remember hanging on dozens of other trees. I am not a traditionalist, by any stretch, but for the past decade or more, I've felt like I live in a world I hardly recognize. I could never have predicted 20 years ago what my life would be like today...cell phones, the internet, my mysterious infatuation with science, my complete loss of faith in most things I took for granted, my strange husband, my even stranger kids...none of it is remotely as I imagined it would be. Why am I not an artist, and how the hell did I end up in the upper left corner of the country?
Christmas is a blessed bit of continuity in my unexpected life.

Still here

I'm still here, in case you were wondering. I'm slogging laboriously through Anatomy and Physiology, trying to eke out an A despite a hideously disorganized and immature teacher (hello, underpaid community college adjunct!) I have to wear a ridiculous respirator in the lab to keep my asthma under control in the presence of irritating formalin fumes from the preserved kitties, and my teacher actually laughed at me for wearing it!
I just worked my skinny old butt off for two weeks learning the muscles in humans and cats, only to have her not ask at all about the tricky extensors and flexors of the hands and feet, which should have been on the exam; to ask repeatedly (as in about four times each) for us to identify the rectus abdominus, the tibialis anterior, the sternocleidomastoid, and the external obliques; and to ask five questions the lab manual specifically said would not be on the exam. It's annoying having to keep this woman in line!
I'm busy, but I'm quite happy for the moment. I love being in school, and I really love science. I feel a vague nostalgia for art, and look longingly at my art materials occasionally, but I still believe that there will be time for that later. The chance that there will not be matters less and less.
I wish I could skip Christmas this year, though. I hate spending money on a Christian holiday. I think that as an atheist I should be exempt. Tell that to the kids, though.

Nasty-gram to a vandal

Last night a vandal slashed tires in my neighborhood, targeting cars with Obama bumper stickers. Just as a person who steals is a thief, the person who slashed those tires is a terrorist. The effect of his behavior is that people are now afraid to express their beliefs and opinions on their bumpers. This terrorist has undermined their freedom of speech. They are also worried that some worse act may follow, perhaps cut brake lines or a brick through a window. These victims do not feel safe in their own neighborhood. This terrorist cut into limited family budgets and kept people who are vital to the health of our community tied up dealing with disabled vehicles. Even those of us who were not targeted are victimized because we do not feel safe either, and our lives were disrupted by the effect of this action on our community.

I don’t know why the terrorist targeted Obama supporters. Perhaps he is a racist or a religious extremist. Perhaps he has bought into the hate and fear which so distorted some people’s view of our new President-elect. I do know that the terrorist has undermined his own cause. He has reinforced the notion that conservatives=racists=hate-mongers=religious extremists=terrorists. Like the Christians who repeatedly target the Scientologists down the street with vandalism, he has given his own cause a bad name. He is no better than the religious freaks who flew planes into the twin towers, and his actions have aligned him with their destructive sort of ideology.

I realize that people who commit acts like this in the dark of night are cowards. They rage against blacks or Democrats or other religions because they feel a sense of powerlessness and impotence in their own lives. Whatever their reasons, though, by their actions, they make themselves criminals. I hope they realize that, and I hope they can see that the only way they can redeem themselves is to confess and make reparations. Until they do, they are criminals, vandals, and terrorists.

When did I become such an angry woman?