Chandra A.

Blue Heron

I’m in bed

my world reduced

to the size of my window.

Cool sheets and pillows.

None of these

ease the hurt

of this hole in my belly,

the incision, the staples

feel like sparks.

You are in the kitchen

pouring coffee

as a blue heron glides

by the window

and disappears

behind the tulip maple.

Later, after the staples

come out, it will flower.

Your footsteps down the hall

excite me. Each time

I see your face feels new.

You stroke my hair

your fingers graceful

as the blue heron

down the hill

Fishing behind the tree.

Lisa D.

Sand Chakra

At the end of my road, there is a channel that opens up into the intercoastal waterway and every few years the silt and sand try to close the gap and fill the space again with land.  The neighbors love it here…they sit on their decks at night, lit with bulbs and the sounds of their kids sweet laughter, they store their boston whalers and midsize family crafts, kayaks and canoes and this small channel provides an outlet from their homes, families and rhythms and routines of brick and pattern into the wild freedom of the water and waves, the tip and turn of the tides, the shifting sands below.

But oh, damn you, shifting silt and sand below.  The swirl and muck with a mind of its own.  The great body of water that ebbs and flows, moving in slow angles from the canals beyond the intercoastal, and fed by the incessant pound of the Atlantic.  The onward push of land towards what they’ve built and established here as safe doesn't quit, so every few years the homeowners association gathers funds and pays a company to come dredge the channel.  

The company works slowly, intermingling this job with a few others up and down this coastal town of Wilmington, NC.  They work the way everyone works around here, the way they want to.  When they show, they show.  When they don’t they dont.  The world below the water gets pumped and sucked, slow and steady and on the days the guys are off doing better jobs, different work or maybe surfing, maybe fishing, maybe sleeping it off, the land slides back where it wants to be.  It's a sneaky business, this moving of land against water, of people against tide.  It's been pulsing here since the beginning of time.

For me and my dog, it's a brief little ecstasy on this first morning of summer.  I’m a teacher, and the season has arrived in full splendor.  We got up with the sun today and made our way down to the point, as the neighbors call, it, this end of the neighborhood where for the last 40 years the dredgers have dug and dumped the silt and sand and formed, over time, a sweeping mound of earth that now stretches out far into the intercoastal, reaching a little further and a little further towards the canal flats, towards the scrub islands of scrappy palms and pines that struggle and live there, herons nests and seagrass, towards the sentinel dunes that finally, if you’re brave and strong and push on just a little harder, land you on Masonboro Island.

This morning, I came to sit and watch the sun.  I’m a new yoga teacher, and I have a problem.  I’m a talker.  I talk.  I talk and talk and talk and talk and talk.  It’s a gift.  I’m the girl at Food Lion that swaps numbers with the checkout lady, because we just bonded over the peach pie recipe that her daughter’s boyfriend's mother gave her and she was going to make it for the next picnic but she wasn't sure, and now she met me and we got that squared away, and we sealed it with a hug after I swiped my card, and life is so beautiful and so good.  I’ve stood in front of a roomful of NHCS district suits, daring to speak of standardized bullshit nonsense and also shaking down the room with a little rendition of “I’m so fancy,,,you already know…”  At Wilmingon Treatment Center, I host a wall to wall roomful of addicts, week after week, and we speak of things that the general population could not bear to hear and we roar with laughter about things like needles and guns, and we bawl our eyes out and I hold their hearts in my gentle palms and we heal, we heal.  I have words, and not one minute do I go ungrateful for the gifts they allow into my life and now that I have them, I shine them out into the world like this sun rising up with the tide in front of me. 

But Houston, he says. Back to the problem.  The problem, you want to know it, here it is.  In my yoga space, with these beautiful yoga students stretch out on the floor around me in savasana, having sweated their faces off and trusted me through a brutal standing series class where my words with absolute confidence guided them in movement of every bone muscle joint their bodies could go, they await a little piece of this wisdom, this knowledge, this drip from my rebel girl soul that I so unabashedly share with rest of the world.  

I kill the lights.  I change the tune.  A song so fittingly titled “Departure”  fills the air - cool and slow - and their anticipation of the glory of my yogic sutra wisdom thickens the space and fuck me, a bengal tiger leaps into the room, and if there is such thing as a throat chakra then this girl’s closes like two strings sealing up a leather pouch of gold coins, like a python tamping down on a baby goat, like…like….huh.  Oh, you funny, funny world.  Like the silt and sand, going where you must.  Riding on the currents of the water, the waves of the sea, the churning waves of the Atlantic, filling up the channel and settling back into the places where you first felt you belonged. 

Sometimes, waves and water and land must claim their own.  They must.  When Covid hit and we all went home and the scientists started checking out the satellite images and noticed that the human race took a break for a minute, they also noticed the earth took a breath and started cleaning herself up.  They said the whole beautiful spinning orb greened herself up pretty quick.  Nature must do what she does.  The ice caps must melt and freeze every millions of years.  The meteors must slam down and kill off a species.  Viruses must make themselves known.  This is truth, I know it in my bones.  

But we interact, because we claim this space as home.  And I don’t want to wreck it.  This morning as I sit and watch, a few boats cruise by, the early ones, slowly through the intercoastal and their wake spreads out gracefully behind them and I notice that as it reaches the little island across from me, the little waves don't slam into anything the way they do the bulkhead I’m sitting on.  The water reaches the sand over there, goes long, reaches farther, stretches out, makes it’s way, and the sand stays still.  Over time, this water, this sand, this pattern will make its way all the way to me, to the fellas trying to dig out a path for my neighbors to bring their boats home to their docks.  

And what's this got to do with my voice?  I don't know.  Wouldn't life be great if when I walk into my studio tomorrow I just close my eyes, picture the dredgers hard at work pumping and dragging and clearing the silt out of my throat and drop some magic on my students?  Yeah man.  Life is certainly beautiful like that sometimes.  The truth is, it doesn't matter.  Right now, a bengal tiger is sitting in there because I have a lesson to learn.  

Tomorrow, the tide will rise.  The sun’s going to shine in a new angle, just a tiny, tiny shift in angle, and while I won’t be sitting there as witness, it’s going to coax the wind up just a little bit.  The seahawk I saw today diving for fish either will or won't be there, more herons, more terns, more gulls laughing and laughing at us grinding away over a tunnel of sand.  We need it.  I hope those dredger guys show up tomorrow.  I hope they do, because I have a whole lot of words to dump on those dudes.  In fact, while I’m no master at baking and this is probably going to be a tragic mess and an embarrassing mistake, I’m going to wrap this up. I’ve got an overwhelming urge to go bake those guys a peach pie. 

Tim J.

Mary H. W.

Brandy M.

Suzanne B.

THE WALK-ABOUT

And the chorus of birds, even in the heart of the city,

they send their greetings each morning, as he took his stroll, his walk-about.

Even with the traffic and other urban cacophony, their song is declared.

The old man, retired, alone, his nerve weakened leg stabilized with a cane,

the old man, he can’t understand what those birds have to sing about,

not here in the city, with all the steel, concrete, asphalt,

too many folks in too small a space. It wasn’t like home.

Home, back there sixty plus years ago in the small town with the dime store,

the dime store where he bought his comic books for ten cents off of a spinner rack.

There the birds had something worth singing about.

He was old now, though, old and tired and alone.

Then he met the girl, the young lady. He’d seen her at the post office, the grocery,

but he’d never spoken, choosing instead to shuffle along on his cane.

She spoke first, a kind greeting., leaning on the bike rack outside the grocery,

all red hair, jeans and sneakers. Old enough to be his granddaughter.

He was enough a southern gentleman to tip his hat and speak kindly back (in passing).

“Don’t you hear those birds?” Her words continued kind, but also with a challenge hint.

“Yes, ma’am,” he told her. “I hear ‘em every morning when I’m walking,

don’t know why they bother singing though, all this city noise.”

“They sing for the same reason you walk, I think,” she said.

“They might be in the city, but the city’s not in them.”

“City’s the only place now I can live cheap,” he said, “don’t drive no more.”

“Where were you born?” she asked. He named the small town.

“And walking recalls your boyhood, I’ll guess, in that small town.”

“It does,” he replied, his leg commencing pain from standing in one point.

“You walk to recall, and in recalling, you’re in the city, but the city’s not in you?”

He had to admit the young lady made a point.

“Would you like to share a coffee?” she asked, “there’s a shop inside the grocery.”

“I suppose,” he found himself offering, but he wasn’t sure why. His leg did need rest.

“I’m Amy,” she offered a hand and he as well did so in return,

“Clarence---Clarence Hart, Miss Amy.” He tipped his hat.

“Clarence, let’s bring our coffees to the patio tables,” Amy tells him. “You can rest your

leg and maybe tell me about your small town.”

“I’d like that,” and Clarence in the moment felt neither old, tired, or alone.

“And we can listen----to the birds.”

When I was a kid growing up on Long Island the low tide smells were among my favorite. It elicits good memories with our large family on the beach. My dad loved to grill bacon and pancakes on a frying pan on the beach. He was born into poverty in East New York, 1930. He was the youngest of seven children. The only thing he had in abundance was a hungry belly. Even love was in short supply in his young life. Bacon on the beach with his four children, his wife, and his wife’s siblings and all of their children was a robustly fulfilling, rich experience for him. There was so much to learn from him and still is even though he died twelve years ago. He was superbly resilient.

When I was two years two months old, I was hit with a stick in my left eye. My brain hemorrhaged behind the eye. I nearly died. My iris is damaged and most importantly my optic nerve is partially severed. I am monocular. I knew none of these details until I was a young adult. I wore a patch during the day over my “seeing” eye for four years. The thought was it would help strengthen the injured one. It didn’t. It did help me develop a keen awareness of sounds and smells, especially of nature, during those four years. Nearly blind I played outside with all of the kids. Each night at dinner I would imitate the sounds I heard outside and then my dad would do my eye exercising with me. He was a competitive guy. I think he took it pretty hard when we learned all of the hard work we did didn’t pay off. For me, the wins from that time in my life continue to bless me. I am superbly resilient.

The frogs around the porch are croaking from the gentle rain. The rain has a sweet aroma today. I have my feet stretched on the porch to feel the light drizzle.

This is the time of day my husband, Tom, is on his non-invasive ventilator in his hospital bed in our bedroom for two hours. He has Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). This is my time to sit with my little world. I used to love to travel. I wanted to see everything. I wanted to go everywhere. We can’t do that these days. I made our life as big as possible by embracing all that is around us. The chicks just learned to fly from the bird nest on the fence. We built seventeen raised beds to fill with lavender. I did most of the heavy lifting and he did what he could. We pushed ourselves to learn to work together on a project. We are not known to do projects together without getting annoyed with each other. Learning to how to make items from wood and grow good gardens, let’s just say I am a work in progress. It’s always been Tom’s love, not mine.

Every morning we sit outside with our coffee and watch the birds wake up. We have woods behind the house that hawks, wood peckers, cardinals, etc. live in.  It sounds like a jungle. We take our second cup of coffee and walk the gardens together. We check for growth, potential disease among the lavender and come across surprises like two snails doing the hokey pokey in the middle of a buttercup. Someone said the lavender beds will be my legacy garden of Tom. I disagree. It is and will always be a cherished and loved garden that we both had our hands and hearts in from the minute we conceived of the idea. I’ll let our grandchildren name it this summer and that’s what we will call it.

The rain has stopped. I’ve had my afternoon dose of fresh air. It is my respite while Tom rests. It’s time to get him up and out of bed and start the last part of the day.

Hot Potato

It’s not even the summer solstice yet, but the potato patch is empty. Yesterday morning the kids and I pulled up the plants that formed from sprouted spuds I had put in the ground during the dark of the moon back in March. It wasn’t my plan to harvest them all. I had wanted to thin the plants a bit and finger out as many bigger potatoes as we could. But I got excited. Even my YouTube obsessed, eight-and-nine-year-old Big Boys bubbled with joy each time they pulled a potato from the dirt. One plant led to another until we had pulled up all the plants in the patch and our little back porch was filled with red Pontiacs and Yukon golds.

This is the first year I’ve grown potatoes. And this is my boys’ first joyful harvest. We are in a new house—a place I’ve landed during my fourth divorce. The divorce is more-or-less amicable, so I send my former husband—now co-parent—a picture of the boys smiling with fists full of new potatoes. Look what we did this morning!, I say.

The marriage had been my longest, ten years. And I had been committed like never before. I’ve known my husband over 30 years and we’ve been on again and off again so many times. But this time feels like forever.

A day later, I’m a little sad looking out the kitchen window at the bare potato patch. I wonder if I should have stuck to my original plan of leaving some of the potato plants in the ground so that they could keep producing. What was I teaching my boys, letting them get carried away. Maybe it’s okay, these days, to encourage girls to get carried away, to be a little wild. But I’m ambivalent about that with boys. Isn’t it better that they practice restraint? And shouldn’t I model restraint? Shouldn’t I teach them about all the good things that come to those who wait—the complexity and sweetness of a thing left to develop to its fullest potential.

The gardens here at the house—though a bit neglected—were laid out by others. The house is owned by my new partner. I own a small place on the other side of town and, rather than live together, we decided to swap houses for the next year. Still, pieces of his life are everywhere around me; he still has clothes in a bedroom closet, tools in the garage, and even some volunteer potato plants in other parts of the garden.

I look out at the little volunteers. I decide to give them more time. And in truth, though the potato patch I planted looks bare, it is not empty. The boys and I planted some corn seed in that spot—late for sure, but we hope to get a fall crop. If the deer don’t eat them, soon the potato patch will be filled with bright green stalks. And I am hopeful.

Call and Response

Last night I tuned into Wiley Cash interviewing J. Drew Lanham, author of, "The Home Place". Mr. Lanham is an ornithologist, a teacher, a writer, a lover and explorer of nature. So the word "bird" came up often in the conversation. Except when Wiley said it, it came out like a kitten, soft from his mouth like others might say "purr". There is a whole story in that, as there is for all of us and how we use our language. If we spit or sneer out a word, like Seinfeld snarling "Newman", we know there is some bad shit happening somewhere in the past that causes the tongue to curdle, not allowing the word or name to escape without punishment. Other words we love and cherish, utter gently, like Wiley's "bird". Maybe that is a quality news folks need to cultivate in reverse - the removal of all personal history from their performance so that the bones of the stories take center stage. Ah, but then they are left covering the horrific, the profound, and wish they had it all back because mere syllables will not compel the listener into the experience. Politicians focus on being heard in the back row and their word-passions are chunked into impersonal, interchangeable blocks, meant to connect us but fail every time - well most times, Barack did have a way about him - because the offering is not from the soul. Preachers suffer similarly. But as writers, we know this and grapple with this and work hard to subtly set-up circumstances to deliver a word or thought or phrase as it might be spoken from our mouths, or our characters mouths, and is thus heard as the reader repeats it and layers on their own story, distilling together their story with ours. Yes, I too love birds, their mysterious universe that hides right in front of me, and that I cannot yet see. I would not have said "bird" any differently.

***

I feel that knowing a character's favorite words or ideas could be an effective nuance to explore. It could help selecting one way of saying something over another. And, the consistency of applying this knowledge is one of the subtle ways a story can feel "right". It may also be an effective riff to explore when the story loses steam, goes flat.