Evident

Hello and welcome to my fourth post. Thank you to my new subscribers and followers. I particularly want to thank

Nelly Bryce

at

Poetry Pals

and

Andrew O. Dugas

at

Daily Haiku Actual Postcard

for recommending my newsletter. I continue to be amazed at the depth of talent and kindness on Substack. I wish I had more time to read and play but I still have to earn a living so I can’t get to everything, which seems to be the story of modern life.

For Christmas my partner Josh and I decided do the DNA ancestry thing. The kits sat on the shelf for a couple of months before we spit in the tubes and sent them in for testing. I really wanted to discover that I was somebody other than who I am. Something more exciting. Surely there had been some illicit liaison several generations ago and I would turn out to be … I don’t know, Italian, Danish? Before I sent the test in, I knew from my family that I was British, Scottish, Dutch with a bit of Irish and German.

We got the tests back on Friday night and eagerly I went online to discover that I’m pretty much who they said I was. I’m about 66% English and Irish, 30.3% French and German. French is as exotic as it gets, from Belgium. Oui?

But I started to think about how much time I’ve wasted wishing I was someone other than who I am and how some of that came from my family and how we often lived as if we were something more than we were. We lived way above our means. All on credit.

This isn’t a post about living within my means, though I did have to learn how to do that. This is a post about appreciating who I am as I am. And I suspect some of you might have spent time wishing you were someone else too. But this life is all I have. This moment. I have choices. I have choices my grandmother and mother never had. I hope my niece has even more options than I do, not fewer, and I will write about that.

I moved across the country, from Texas to California to go to graduate school, where I still live today. I was married and then I got divorced. I’ve been sober for decades now. I’ve lived with depression. I’m sixty today, and it wasn’t until my fifties that my life began to root in fertile ground. Steadied. That I steadied, my work steadied, my poetry began to really find itself. It took every thing to get to this point.

My DNA report also indicated that I was likely to consume more caffeine than most. No one is surprised by that. I live, I absolutely live, for coffee.

I will leave you a tiny poem I wrote in January that fits today’s theme.

January 

               grass so green
fresh lush mud on my rain boots

stomping through a circle of 
turning points, a mind full of 
edits revisions poem prompts

Wind knocks the window’s sash
struck by how much I love my life

Thank you for reading.