Sabbath #134

Just back from the field.  The temperature cooler than most May days and I’m readying my study to add furniture from the office I am closing across the bay. I’ll add another desk and one more  book shelf. Now one table for each project. I also removed the family portrait from above my desk and added the old Copper Canyon poster Poetry back, front and center. Poetry, front and center. Poems still to the right of my computer, new and revised. The folder this spring is building and that brings happiness. Whether the poems have merit or not at this point does not matter. It feels like after two years, I am finally moving in. I hate to make any declarations because the minute I do something unpredictable and of importance  happens to alter my desired state. Two years ago this weekend my former husband of 36 years died in his home. With our children so far away, I was called. And today I don’t want to go into that remembrance. Time passes. We begin and then we begin and begin again. Sometimes we relocate ourselves. Often we discover a haiku written on the back of blue paper: pink sunrise, cold & clouds / one cup of black tea, brewing /yearning for forest path. No date but the continued practice. Then a list: walk, phone calls, poems, answer letters. I’m ready to settle in. This morning before six, I baked a chocolate cake, sliced the strawberries, added them to the bowl of blueberries. It is the season. Later I’ll bake the beans for this afternoon. And just now I hear the church bells ringing, announcing the half hour and the end of the first service. Two years, I’m remarried, two years since my former husband died. No accident he died on the eve of my marriage and the morning of my birthday. I suppose I cannot escape the remembrance. The sad events coupled with momentary bliss and promise of new life. And Eliot, as always, in my mind: Home is where one starts from…We must be still and still be moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion… In my end is my beginning. And this week yet another ending and beginning, moving the furniture from across the bay, closing down an office of thirty one years. Unpacking boxes, unpacking more boxes. Unpacking words, unmeasurable distances between the life and the lived life.