Summer Reflections

Environmental over-load and unfortunate sad stories.  Three parents of my daughter's peers  have died from cancer within the last two months.  Lovely people.  Devoted mothers and fathers.  All under fifty.  Another friend is dying of lung cancer.  Another dear friend is doing well post breast cancer treatment (radiation).  I just had a mole removed that might be melanoma.  I'm scared.  I'm hoping it is nothing, but I cannot help but worry.  I'm also due for the full round of tests--colon, breast, blood.  None of these tests are fun (blood being the least bothersome), but all are deeply nerve wracking and fear grips me right in the solar plexis.  My mind races to the worst; unfortunately, I can see the outcome of these cancers quite vividly, as I have sat near too many bedsides of the dying.

The thing is: we all know so many people in the same situation, and we're all living in this kind of high intensity state of environmental fear.  A perpetual eco trauma. 

It is in moments like these that I don't like doing this work.  When I'm in my own personal panic, I don't want to read about nuclear radiation in Japan poisoning children and leaking into the seas, or about toxics, fracking, tar sands, deforestation, and all the rest.

I want to escape into the world of Anne of Green Gables.  I want to walk in the woods, throw off my clothes, jump into a pond of cool green water. 

Maybe that is why I send my daughter to a camp that is from another time.  They don't play competitive sports, or do computer art, or put on fancy plays, or get in buses and travel the country, or learn how to make robots. Instead, they farm,  sleep outside, swim in the lake, cook in the kitchen.  They make simple crafts in the woodshop.  They put on on a play in a barn and wear costumes cobbled together by hand.  They folk dance and sing.  They go on a canoe trips and hike up a mountain or two or three.

Oh to a more simple time I long to go!

Fracking: Hydraulic Fracturing 101

Fracking: Water Quality

Fracking: Air Quality

Red Riding Hood

a hand in the dark
careful what you wish for
spoken only in sleep

wild storms wild love

you were covered in fur

tore
from me
that
crashing

what wound had you 
carried 
in your skin
what cancer burn

that love
sweet love

could
not
stick

Luminescent Motherhood

Olivia sleeps with the light on

dreaming of horses and ice skates

throws herself upside down

on bruised knees kicking  

arms locked around

this flat heart

I miss the nursing child

baby in the sling

gums on my chin

calling, Mama nuna

I thought when god gave

me a baby

she would stay

a baby

but she grows longer, longer, longer

when will she die

or leave me?

when will I die

or leave her?

have I left already?

would I feel such shyness

if I had had more children?

or if I had not

lost everything

including my

eyebrows and pubic hair?

or if my parents had

died happy deaths?

mother under serene white

lights hallow

nurse telling me to

rub her dry skin with lotion

feet peeling with disease

(for years) I could not bear to

touch or see her epidermis

waiting for my mother to die

too quickly in the ICU

asking for her other daughter

father broken head

big body no longer

wrapped but zipped and

carried off by stranger men--

after we so many hours, sung

Joel's rabid guitar

by the rivers of Babylon

where he sat down

and there he wept

how did the sun

do this?

do I cry out?

(what that spindly spider child

wove and dug

under my baby's skin

taking the prescient

precious red)

about my own cancer?

about such volumes of bluegrey bile?