In my backyard.

February 24, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

I find writing comforting, difficult, necessary.
I write in my mind, every day.
My backyard is a war zone. My heart?
It has been a warm winter, waiting for snow. The daffodils are out (how can that be?) and I worry about climate change. The ground is all misshapen in the backyard, sinister brown with patches of bare dirt spreading, is it the hens, stripping it bare, Marilou, La Rousse, Pitiblanche, Thing One and Thing Two, laying again since mid-January, big impossible eggs, blue eggs, white eggs, brown eggs, hah here’s to all of you Misters Make American White Again my backyard flock is a motley of colors and so is my family.
The ground is hard still but the trace of the moles’ invasion of this summer I still feel under my feet, the undulation, as I pace back and forth between the back door and the compost pile, the daily chores unfolding, comforting. Things are rotting. Promising.
The promise. My backyard is not a war zone but a promise.

The light.

February 1, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

There is the darkness all engulfing. And there is the light. That morning it was in the sky, out of the peculiar drawings of the clouds, the precise hue of the blue, and the white clapboard house. It was enough.
It was in the morning and I was walking up the short street that runs from the park behind the kids’ school to a busy street with the city’s recreation facility and a strip mall and the grocery store where I shop. I had walked with the boys and continued on after they entered school, there was the familiar crossing guard, she lives just there, the house with the big trees across the street, she had a hat on, it was crisp, even if far from one of these cutting cold Missouri winter days, I walked on to the gym, and my mind wandered, and its wanderings were stopped by the scene just above my walking vision, looking up there were plane trails crossing and dissolving in the pale blue, against the dark street below and the white house to the left, banal, not ugly. I did not stop, my mind stopped and lingered there, and I was light again, for a moment.
Light against the darkness that closes in when I brush against it in my core, not all around but right here in my life, and it scares me, but just so, and the light is there, I will always know. Photography is light. It is there, just like writing, and protesting.
There is joy in the protesting, and resisting ends, time and again, when the feet start to hurt and the kids start being too restless, it ends around a pizza at Shakespeare’s, the local pizza joint favored by journalism students because it is right across the street from the Journalism School, and by most of the town along with them.
Postcards from a Mid-western town where the darkness all around sometimes is in my heart too, but soon fades in shades of soft light blue.