Her strength.

She says her arms are threaded up, that it feels like the threads are pulling through her skin. "Now imagine the thread unraveling slowly, and that's what my anxiety feels like. And the threads go faster and faster, and then I just fall apart so quickly."

She has scratch marks on her cheeks because scratching her cheeks feels good, but then she has to make the scratches even. One scratch down on the left, one scratch down on the right. Again and again.

She pushes her teeth because her teeth "feel weird."

She had a panic attack, hyperventilating outside of the school office, crying and gagging.

She is eight-years-old, and it isn't fair. It just isn't fair that the world assaults her this way. The fear and the tears in her green-brown eyes. When she's happy they look like the light shining through an overhead canopy of leaves in the late parts in summer. When she's sad they are a torment, a storm rolling over mountains.

But I don't want to write poetry about her anxiety, about her innocence, about a childhood laced in irrational panic.

Yesterday she did her multiplication homework and put her spelling words in alphabetical order. She played Crossy Road on her Kindle. She ate a hot dog and pretzels and read the second Percy Jackson book. She stepped gingerly through mud on a walk and caught a toad in her hands.

Yesterday I watched her run fearlessly into the darkening night, her purple-sequin cardigan dipping low on her back, baring her pale, delicate shoulders to the descending cold.

She could raise a whole city on those small shoulders. She could balance the rising moon.

Here are the blankets

The Sciences Sing a Lullaby
Albert Goldbarth

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down. 

In a Fashion

My darling, my dear, I have been listening
to sad songs for you. Sorrow fits you well,
like a coat with sleeves that touch the exact
right point on your wrists. It's just right, it's
perfect. You could button it and sit snug in
your sorrow. It could protect you from the
cold. I want to help you with the buttons. I
want to suggest accessories. I want you to
wear it with flouncy skirts and sparkly shoes
and dance in shadows. You could kick your
feet to these sad songs and twirl. You could
wear your tears like the finest jewels. And
you could still smile. And when the song is
over you could remove the coat and hang it
on a hook. You could come back to it, if you
needed. You could move on and walk in the
light, if you wanted.

Another Anger

When did your mouth harbor a tempest
How did it grow, what sparks of thought
traveled the length of your tongue
to unleash a torrent

You screamed that I deserved it
You screamed that your anger is sadness
You slammed a door

Oh, you complicated girl

You turn to leave, feet commanding
earthquakes,

hands summoning another slammed door.

Still. Your fury flies your hair as you turn
It catches the light in the hall

and for a moment all I see is gold.

My fairytale.

“Yes, I need you, my fairytale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought—and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”
-- Vladimir Nabakov -- 

Implosions.

thank you,
yes,
in a minute I will have had enough
in a minute I will be full up

here in the swell of my chest

the anxious scrabbling of the beat
of my heart is a word


I will say it and

in a minute everything will change

and it will be something loud, lingering

at least
in the silent after

I will breathe again

The how and the why of us.

We've been marking time in leaves. An awareness of the seasons, the tiniest changes that mark new weather, new life, has become something I know intimately, a tender, secret mark in the marrow of my bones. It's that way for all of us, I know. It's been stitched into the fabric of our family. It's how we've come to know ourselves.

It's strange to think of it, but the park has become almost a silent member of our family. It's our touchstone, the thing that draws us together every day, as nourishing as a family dinner every Sunday. It's the comfort of bowed heads and prayers, hand holding and snuggles.

My oldest daughter discovered her love of snakes here. She uncovered the strangest bugs and snared toads. She's named her favorite trees and come to know the paths as well as she knows herself. It's where she first began testing out her limbs, the strength of her muscles. Running down sidewalks, climbing small walls, jumping with abandon.

My youngest has followed in her big sister's footsteps, spotting skinks and cooing over copperheads slithering across the path in front of us. She's fallen and scraped her knees and we've celebrated it, the essential childhood markers of scabbed knees that come from exploring your world to the fullest, the healing that comes from picking yourself up and moving on again. It's a challenge and a blessing for her, a life lesson in every single moment. She gets stuck on the smallest details, the tiny grasshoppers and the snails--and the bigger details, too. The largeness of her big sister. The wild calling of the world.

Together we've learned the value of getting lost in a moment, of escaping the everyday. We've become us, the complicated tangle that we are. It always seems to get smoothed out on the trail. Where together we can just be.

This year has been more special somehow, watching the floods take over our park and recede again. The landscape has changed, and we're relearning the paths and the magic of it all. In the heat of summer we're already thinking of fall, ready to feel the cooler wind. Ready to watch the leaves change. Ready to see how we change with them. Again and again.

A time lapse of helplessness and grit.

"It's the crookedest, jumbliest little house. But it's happy, now, and so am I. It's been worth the exercise, worth the filth, as change always is, no matter how sore or how broke you are the next day. It's a time lapse of a helplessness and grit, turns of growing up and growing softer until you land somewhere in the middle, safe and sufficient."

(From here.)

We've got another thing coming undone.

I can hear the sound of destruction, a large cracking as trees are wrenched from the banks and pulled into the swollen river. I can watch my little forest nymphs running along the sidewalk, hair spangled with storm remnants, wet and shining in the green and gray around them. I can pause at sidewalks made impassible from makeshift rivers and transient waterfalls. Water has a way of claiming the season. Of claiming everything, really: bridges and fields, skies, insects, me. I have lost myself to this endless rainy season, traipsing through the woods every evening, chasing impossibilities: forever and on and forever.

Here they are barefooted and nimble, squishing through mud with abandon. Here are the ants seeking higher ground for their homes, holding little white eggs aloft. Here is a giant wolf spider drying itself off on a low part of the bridge. Minutes later that part is under water. The spider's inched just a bit higher.

Everything is washed out of hiding: toads and frogs and tiny pink worms. Everything is washed out of hiding: me. I have lost myself to escaping the four walls of my life, the trapped confines of my life. I have given myself to a world bursting at the seams.

The trees have burst into fragrant white blooms. The children are tired. Dark is falling fast and the fireflies are rising up and out. Let's go a little further, one says. Let's go home, says the other.

I want to say: Let's never ever go home. But the lightning is cracking and thunder is shaking everything. It's one long deep breath back. My chest is full-to-bursting with the long walk, a rattling that sounds like trees crashing down, rending the air into pieces. I'll let it out tomorrow when I have another chance at the wet, ruined world.

(Title comes from "Runaway" by The National.)

Unseen uglies and little lovelies.

It's a disgusting little thing, its lumpish white body and its long, twisting tail. Madeleine dug it up from a pool of water and brought it to us with a look of revulsion on her face. "Look at this weird thing," she says. "I wonder what it is."

We all stare and agree it's disgusting, but cool. I tell Madeleine that I want to make a video, so she holds it up to the light. She doesn't want to hold the squirmy thing for very long. Violet is whining about something in the background. It's not a magic nature moment by any stretch, and yet light filters through its nearly translucent skin, illuminating some dark mass of biology inside, and there's something ineffable about it, too. Looking under the surface of things to pull up something dark and unseen, but somehow lovely in its mystery.

I do a little research and find out that the disgusting thing is actually a drone fly larva. That little "tail" is really more like a snorkel, enabling what is essentially a water maggot to breathe in even the murkiest water conditions.

I dig a little deeper to see what the larva turns into and find out it grows into a pretty cool honeybee mimic. And that these little guys are important pollinators of crops and wildflowers. It turns out I actually took a photo of a grown drone fly during the same outing.

Beauty comes from ugly things pretty much all the time, right? You just have to seek it out.