A Beginning-of-the-Semester Haiku

A Haiku for Needing to Keep My Enrollment at 25 Students
(or: "No Room at the Inn")

First day of my class:
so many folks wish to add!
They cannot join us.

(I know it's an awful haiku--mine are deliberately so)

Returning

Grief is a slow journey; slowly, I re-enter life and the world again after my mother's death. I went to African dance for the first time in weeks today and felt better than I have in awhile. This week was my first week back teaching and I felt happy to be in the classroom, happy later to have some time in my office, looking out at the trees, even though the branches are so bare right now and it seems warmer days will never come. When I danced tonight, I felt an ocean of sadness that my mother had never found a way to know her strengths, that she never just trusted enough. For so long in African dance, I refused to dance in the front row (our class divides into rows of four as we follow the teacher's moves across the floor)--the front row is the most visible, and I always wanted to hide, buried in the middle of the dancers so I wouldn't be seen. Tonight I was right in front, dancing right behind the teacher, WITHOUT feeling like a total dork. This was a big breakthrough for me.

Thanks, Ma

BTW, just after my mother died, I got an acceptance of a poem that has been singularly hard to place, entitled "When Max Called." This was accepted by Santa Fe Literary Review, and is about none other than my mother.
Pretty amazing. Thanks, Ma.

I've been trying to focus on the good things about my mom, the things that sort of showed through her alcoholism--her humor, her funny observations of the world, even her knitting--she was a beautiful knitter, even in her cups, and I have a sweater and poncho she made for my eldest son and daughter. There were many good things about my mom, and I think it's important for me to remember these as I go through my grieving.

It's hard to pick up life and move on after losing someone as significant as a parent, but possible. I am glad I am teaching this semester--it's good to just have something to keep life moving forward.

I Can't Believe

I can't believe how many days have gone by since I posted. Grief is like that with me--I really retreat into a metaphorical cave. It's hard to begin to look forward, to work on my syllabus for a class which is new to me, to start back on the book, to go rather numbly through my list of tasks. Grief is like that.

I have not yet dreamed of my mother, but my daughter did, saying that my mother came to her in a dream and said in amazement that both of my daughters are beautiful, and she handed my eldest a box of thread spools, to help her with her work in fashion design!

Losing a parent is truly one of the hardest things I have ever gone through. I loved my mother very much, for all her difficult life, and it is sad for me to not be able to plan her next gift--it was so much fun for me to find something just right for her.

BTW, y'all--my mother left no will (at least none that can be found). Don't do this to your heirs--it is as chaotic as anything you can imagine.

Downpour

I have just got the power back on, after being out for over 36 hours. We have experienced heavy rain, flooding, high winds, trees down, lighting, hail, the whole gamut of bad West Coast weather. There wasn't a utility candle left in all of Felton, it seems--I had to make do with Martha Stewart votives, scented like "shortbread" (actually, the scent is like waxy, perfumed butter). I even weathered the worst part of the storm all by myself, with nary but the family dog for company as the power went out, branches went sailing across the yard like javelins, and when I went out to get wood for the woodstove, found that the wheelbarrow (in which we keep our wood) was flooded and the firewood was bobbing about. I had one stick of dry firewood left, as well as kindling, and kept the house warm anyway, slowly drying the wet wood in the fireplace. The feeder creek to the pond down the road, usually so slow and meandering that it can barely be seen (so much so that I didn't even know it existed until 1997, though it runs in the canyon right below our house) , is whitewater right now.

All the while I was in the dark house, I got scared that my deceased mother would appear to me (sorry, when I'm in these dark woods, middle of nowhere, the rain pouring down, and nothing but candles to light the rooms, my imagination goes a little wild). But Mom came to me only in a dream last night, in my distant childhood home, and she was happily doing some small household chores--just in the time and place I remember her as being happiest.