Past and present

Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts Magazine

Welcome to all of you. Thank you for reading and accompanying me on this journey and thank you for hanging in there with me. Life has been, as one of my friends says, “very lifey” lately so I missed last week’s post. I didn’t have it in me. My mom has had a couple of falls and needs more help; our kitty Pookie is sick, and I have a journal to edit and books. I had to devote last weekend to making final edits on my upcoming book Tsunami (due out in August from Unsolicited Press). I’m holding the challenges and the gifts in both hands and somedays I’m showing up with a bit of grace and somedays not.

In our home, circa 2016 or so

I have two poems in the Fall issue of Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts. (Because they were just published you’ll have to click the links to read the poems.) In essence the poems mark the beginning and the present day of my relationship with my partner Josh. The first poem “One Day in a Year” is a prose poem about our first trip to Bodega Bay in early March 2012. We had gotten together in February (we kind of skipped the dating part of it) and moved in together by May.

A few months later I was really wondering if I had made a horrible mistake. I went to talk my friend Steve, and he said, very kindly, “Well if you had asked my advice, although you wouldn’t have taken it, I would have told you to hang on to your apartment. You didn’t. You decided that you wanted to be all in, so you need to be all in right now.”

Josh was also having second thoughts. His friend Jon asked him when our lease was up, and suggested that we decide then if we wanted to renew the lease on our relationship as well. It was actually brilliant advice, so that’s what we did for a couple of years, until we only had to renew the lease on the house, and then we bought a house in 2016 with a thirty-year mortgage.

The second poem, “What Love Is,” is about our relationship today. We’ve been together now for almost fourteen years. Josh is 66 and I’m 62, and we talk about maybe getting married once I’ve turned 65. We don’t want to rush into things.

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If you would like to read more of my poetry, my book Gathering the Pieces of Days, celebrates the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of our days. You can get your copy from Unsolicited Press, Bookshop.org, or Asterism.