The Next Thing and the Next Thing

Summer is coming to a close, which means the children go back to school, Henry starts preschool three days a week, and football season begins. Now that we're done with this thing, onto the next thing. The clouds are racing and changing across the sky, moving the weather and the seasons along, and now it's almost fall. Would ya look at that.

Who am I kidding? I'll be whining all fall
about this guy being on the road.

This might be the first year I am not overcome by anxiety about Brandon's travel each weekend. Maybe it's because nobody in our family is playing soccer, so I don't have any Saturday morning, standing in the cold and rain, cranky spectator obligations. Maybe it's because the kids are getting older and more manageable on my own. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and able to occasionally recognize the lonely Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights without Brandon around after the kids go to bed for what they are, or can be: my weekly writer's retreat, my silence, my repose. Maybe I'm just at a really steady and secure place, not overwhelmed by job decisions or graduate school or babies, just... here.

Don't hold your breath, though; I will probably find myself sitting in our living room a night not too far in the future, alone with my laptop, pouring tears and capital letters into this blog, waiting waiting waiting for my husband to come home.

Voted "Most Powerful" for the Ashland University
MFA Class of 2015

Keeping in the spirit of weekly writer's retreats, though, I am very excited about this fall. I finished my MFA at Ashland University this summer, and I spent the last few weeks reorganizing and writing a few additional pages towards my manuscript, American Honey. I am really pleased with this final draft... or at least this I-think-I'm-ready-to-send-to-agents-and-editors draft, and my plan this fall is to send it out into the world of agents and editors. If you are by some magical coincidence an agent or editor reading this now who sees the need for a collection of memoiristic essays about the first decade of marriage, temptation, desire, and love, well, ahem, I'm available by email, phone, or post. I can even access a fax machine.

One of the essays in the manuscript was just published online by the litmag Full Grown People, "Careful Intimacies." To me, it captures the spirit and tension throughout this collection. That essay I linked to above about soccer, "The Worst Soccer Mom," is also included.

I'm also continuing as a regular contributor to Off the Page, a ministry of Our Daily Bread, and I'm loving that monthly exercise. I write twice a month for them. It's where I've been going to hash out the things I think about on the way to work, listening to audiobooks, the matters of faith that matter most to me right now. Here are a few of my most recent posts:

Today: Sabbath Afternoon - "If you haven’t done so lately, it’s time to grab a picnic blanket before the warm days slip away and the evening sun skitters over the horizon in the hurry of new autumn notebooks..."

August 5: Know Thyself - "One of the things I love about this world (and there are many of them) is the synchronous connections that happen throughout the whole body of knowledge. I was reminded of this again recently..."

July 22: At Least Ten Best Things about Girl Friends - "Greeting Cards We are called to encourage each other, and so we buy and send and give them on a whim. Thinking of you! we say. Hang in there! we say. You and me, we’re..."

July 8: Gas Station Evangelism - "An older woman pulled up behind me the other morning as I was pumping gas. She got out, walked straight over with her Bible in her hand, and said she had a verse for..."

This Day in History:

2014 - You're Going the Wrong Way: God's Plan and Purpose...

2013 - Just Call Me Sarah "All Heart" Wells (oh Lord, what a day at church this was.)

2012 - The Road Ahead: Fall 2012 Outlook

2011 - Soccer Mom Fail (the origins of "The Worst Soccer Mom" essay)

2010 - I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map

2009 - Pushing Matchbox Cars

2008 - Seconds from Shaken Baby (the good ol' days... ugh)

The Desire to Be Desired

A couple of weeks ago was the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference, and leading up to that were lots of long nights getting ready. I've been feeling frustrated with my ability to make time for writing, here or anywhere else, but now that the conference is over and I've given my brain a little break from evening writing duties, I am ever hopeful that I can return to writing. I guess it's a season of scribbling notes on my iPhone notepad to get to later.

Well, I am writing, two blog posts a month for Off the Page, and I have a series of heron poems that keep coming to me like little mercies. I've been enjoying the blog posts I'm writing for Off the Page, but it is a different kind of writing than essaying. It's the essaying I miss right now. When I was whining about this to my friend Tania a couple weeks before the conference, she told me, "What, you can't write for the next 14 days? Big deal!" and grant yourself the space and permission not to write for now. I'm pretty sure that's what she said. So, okay, stop whining. There are worse things in the world than not writing for a small stretch of time.

Watching the Cavs game

In other news, it's SUMMER and baseball season. We spend a solid four to five nights a week at someone's baseball or softball game right now, and I loooooove it. There's nothing like sitting outside in late summer afternoons, the pace of a ballgame, an excuse to do nothing but enjoy the evening... ah. I love it. Have I mentioned that I love it?

We're also letting the kids - especially Elvis and Lydia - stay up a bit later now that it's summer, and they've been staying up to at least the half for the Cavs games the last two weeks. It's been fun spending that additional downtime with the two of them, even though it's intruding on my alone time with Brandon, which is always so guarded. Lydia sat on my lap last night for part of the game and now stretches out almost as long as I am. They are amazing people.

What I've been listening to:

I just finished up two books by Bill Bryson - At Home and In a Sunburned Country. I almost started One Summer and then changed my mind. There's only so much of the same voice reading to you that you can take. I loved both books. They were engaging and funny and informative. Before that I listened to Small Victories by Anne Lamott and LOVED it. I'll probably go back to Lamott again soon because she's so funny and tear-inducing, and I like that kind of writing.

I shifted gears and started listening to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. For some reason it isn't at all what I thought it would be, but I also don't know exactly what I was expecting, so there's that. I'm really enjoying the switch to fiction for a spell, and I love the narrator's voice, the epistolary nature of the writing, and the gradual unfolding of the story. It's no wonder it won a Pulitzer.

What I've been up to:

If you are into Jo Ann Beard or you want to be, you might enjoy the presentation that Jill Christman and I did at the River Teeth Conference: "Negotiating the Plasmapause: Patterned Images, Delayed Revelation, and Sheer Awesomeness in Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth"

The series for Off the Page I mentioned in my last post, The Desire to Be Desired, has wrapped up. Here they are in summary with links to the full posts:

The Desire to Be Desired

I ran as fast as I could through the wood chips and up the wooden steps and beckoned from the highest point of the playground equipment. “You can’t catch me!” I shouted, grinning and staring down into the faces of Nick Germano and Jason Ream, and when they motioned for the steps, I squealed and giggled, sliding half-way down the stainless steel slide, its hot metal burning my hands and thighs. I stopped and waited to see which way they chose to go so I could make my break-away run, away from my chasers.


So went every day on the playground in first grade, then second, then third, sometimes different boys, eventually new playgrounds, but always the same game. Tag, freeze tag, TV tag, hide-and-go-seek tag, You can’t catch me! No one wanted to be caught, not really, anyway. What would you do when you were caught? That was the end of the game, the end of the chase. The thrill was in the running, the pursuit, the simple and potent knowledge that someone sought to catch you. Read More...

What Good Guys Do

One night, my husband and I were out at a country line-dancing bar. He got up to pay our tab and I watched the couples waltz on the floor.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” a voice came up from behind. I turned on my barstool and grinned at a guy obviously looking for a dance partner.

“I’m fine!” I said cheerily. He glanced down at my hand resting on the bar.

“Oh, you’re married!” he said, his arms flinging up in the air into the “I surrender” position. “I’m sorry!”

I nodded, still grinning as he walked away and Brandon came back. They exchanged glances, the guy smiling meekly and my husband giving him a nod of acknowledgement.

“Ready to go, Tiny Dancer?” Brandon asked.

“That guy was trying to hit on me!” I said with astonishment.


“Yeah, I figured,” he said, wrapping his arm around my waist and guiding me toward the door. I continued grinning, the warmth of admiration and the heat of my husband’s palm on the small of my back making me glow faintly on the way to the car. Read More...

Empty Houses

It has been three years since I sat in a dark bar on the dark side of town alone with a colleague, out for a drink to talk about writing and family and his failing marriage. It has been three years since he confessed to having a crush, his hand flitting like a fly on and off of my thigh. Three years since I laughed and blushed, stunned to be so openly admired by someone other than my husband. I didn’t know how to handle this advance, how to stand and stare down disaster before it could take root.

Instead, I wanted to be nice. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. My “no” was mushy and clouded with desire—not for this other man but for this other man’s words, this other man’s advances, the unabashed expression of his desire for me. Me! Goofy and ridiculous me, flabby around the middle me, mother of three, me! “But I love my husband,” I said, again and again, with a grin, because I also loved to hear how beautiful this other man found me, how lovely, how smart, how good.


I would like to say that I stood up and slapped him. After all, he had just shook hands with my husband in our living room, just stood in the presence of all our wedding pictures and smiling faces of our children. I would like to say that I insisted he drive me home, immediately. I would like to say that every email conversation and text message from there on was strictly professional and never slid slyly into flirtatious, that I reported his advances to my supervisor and ended it, ended the confusing, terrifying, anxiety-inducing friendship and work relationship. But I didn’t. Read More...

The Directions Desire Can Take Us

It’s tempting to conclude this series on desire with the pattest of pat answers: If I were truly holy and pursuing God, this fire would be quenched and I would never again face the dichotomy of flesh and spirit, as if my body is evil and my spirit is good.

Except God made me, body and spirit. Adam needed a helpmate and so he was given Eve, before the Fall, before separation from God. Sarah needs a helpmate and so she is given Brandon.

We are made for connection, with God and with others. This connection is rooted in two things: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.


If God is love and we learn to love God by watching Jesus, then loving our neighbors as ourselves is one of the only ways we can express and experience that love for ourselves. It’s a give-and-get kind of relationship, a pay it forward, a pouring out to be filled again and again. Read More...

Back then --
2014: Holiday Greetings from Nine-Month-Contract Land
2013: Why Do We Need Men?
2012: Corrective Lenses and Parenting
2011: In the Center Ring: Motherhood vs. Work
2010: Maybe She's Born With It...
2009: Potty Training Adventures

What are we going to do today?

We are going to do nothing. Nothing at all, nothing planned, nothing scheduled, no agenda, no calendar items, no outings, no play dates, not even laundry. We are doing nothing.

I am out of the office (again) after the two-week summer residency. Because I worked so much during the last two weeks, I've been itching to schedule out all kinds of fun during this week of vacation, this final week of honest-to-goodness summer before I go back to regular hours and they get ready for school. It has taken me a few days to feel like a thinking human being instead of a gray lump of motionless clay, but now, there are plenty of things-to-do on our things-to-do calendar, like the zoo, a Rubber Ducks ballgame, a wedding, a birthday party.

But TODAY, there is nothing. I laughed at Lydia and Elvis as they whined, "There's nothing to doooo," creating two syllables where there's only supposed to be one. Yes, there's nothing!

I feel a certain mix of guilt and delight knowing that my kids have to figure out for themselves what to do to keep entertained without the default television or video game. I have to resist the urge to monologue, "When I was your age..." but in my head, I remember it being just me and my brothers, or me and my cousins, inventing games and playing for hours. Or reading, how many hours did I sit and just... read?

Today, the kids have thirteen potential playmates within 500 feet of our house. It is a rare occasion when none of them are home, but it does happen, like this morning, when some are off to camp and others off to daycare and others still off to dentist appointments. It takes a little perseverance to break through the whining, but sooner rather than later, the default settings of boredom are overridden by creativity, and now they play Spy or build castles in the sand, or, like right this minute, they go to the pound and bark like dogs.

Meanwhile, my "nothing" is reading The Circus Train by Judith Kitchen, a novella-length essay that turns inward and outward, tracing trains of thought and circus trains and memory itself the way that one can only do when sitting still. Paused. Besides following Henry from the front of the house to the back and then to the front again in some subconscious attempts by him to keep me from being productive, I have wandered with her through memory and into my own past, where cousins counted different colored cars as they passed, where we stretched out on a blanket and stared up at the clouds, making shapes and figures out of vapors.

Now, I have sat here long enough to hear the dozen honey bees humming in the Russian sage. I have sat here long enough to watch a monarch butterfly dart from flower to flower, its lemon wings folding and unfolding. I have sat here long enough to watch a hundred cars accelerate and brake up and down our street, darting along their roads between somewhere and somewhere else, off to do something, and I have done nothing except observe and travel through Judith Kitchen's memory into my own and back again, back to the monarch on the flower, back to the buzz of cars and bees and children, back to the nothingness of activity.

Holiday Greetings from Nine-Month-Contract Land

I'm a Donkey on the edge!

Back in November, I surveyed the approach of the holidays, the onset of bowl season, the ramping up of my husband's travel season, and the end to my four-day work-week on an 11-month contract. With all of the calm and clarity of a person anticipating the possibility of another mental breakdown, I sent an email off to my boss and the chair of the department declaring my desire for...no, the necessity of a modification to my contract. Either I work less or I look for another job. Boom.

If life was organized into collections of photo albums like it is on Facebook, then for me, the Spring of 2013 is the cardboard box of photos and negatives that got dropped in a mud puddle and then a toddler crawled inside and crinkled them all up. Every single thing was difficult. A quick peek back around February/March 2013 is funny-sad-bad.

I wasn't positive that this spring would be different, but I knew one thing. I didn't want to do that again.

It turned out that Spring 2014 was not the same soggy cardboard box of photos that Spring 2013 was, though when May ended I stumbled out of it feeling a little shocked and surprised.

Well. *Looks around at the lack of wreckage* That wasn't so bad. That actually went well. Brandon worked more local games, and I think that is the primary reason my head didn't implode.

There was also the shining beacon of The Future ahead: As of June 1, my 11-month contract at Ashland University turned into a 9-month contract.

After the first month of my new arrangement in which I had anticipated hours of free time spent with my family laughing and dancing in sunlight while Bob Marley sang "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and evenings cozied up on the couch with my man and my laptop writing the Next Best American Essay Collection, I am here to report that living in nine-month-contract land is not all that it is cracked up to be.

JUST KIDDING. IT'S AWESOME.

On Wednesday, I was off in nine-month-contract land checking email, because that's what I do from home when I'm not in the office, and Henry crawled up onto my lap between me and the computer, grabbed both of my arms and held them against his chest. He would NOT let me type. No matter how much I tried to break away, he just wouldn't let go. He thought it was SO funny, me chuckling and trying to type. 

"Now, Henry, let me just... if I can just finish this one thing... Just... Let go, Henry!" I said, for about twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes. That's how long I tried to do WORK from HOME on an UNPAID VACATION DAY while my son held my appendages hostage against his chest.

Here is the only trouble with nine-month-contract land that I can see, and it's all my fault: I still feel an obligation and necessity to work twelve months out of the year, to check my email and answer questions, even when I have a new administrative assistant I can delegate things to out of sheer necessity of NO TIME to do all the things anymore. I care a lot about my work, and I want it to be successful.

But Henry wouldn't let me work, so with a huge exasperated sigh I closed my laptop. This is where it gets really tough. Prepare yourselves for the horror of nine-month-contract land.

I took the kids to the pool.

We swam for a full hour with no pressing deadline to hurry up get out we need to go home to eat dinner and then bathe and then sleep. Normally, if I took the kids to the pool, we would go at 6 p.m. after eating the fastest dinner on earth, swim until 6:30, get out because it takes my children 30 minutes to move from the pool to our car, go home and take the baths that require 45 minutes of undressing and peeing and splashing and redressing, and then FINALLY bedtime. During that stretch from 5 p.m. until 8 p.m., I am in constant forward-thinking mode - hurry up and fill-in-the-blank so that we can hurry up and fill-in-the-blank. 

But Wednesday, in nine-month-contract land, there was no hurry up. There was only swim. Okay, you've had enough swimming? I guess we should get out then. Ho hum. Tweedle dee. Off we go. Meander and twiddle. Into the car. La dee da. Home again home again, jiggedy jig. At home, I made lunch at my leisure. 

Here, kids. Here is some food. Eat when you are hungry until you are hungry no more. The sun peeled back the clouds and the atmosphere warmed up, so, kids, why don't we go to the spray park? La la la. Off we go. Have some snacks, there's nowhere to be except here, right here, in nine-month-contract land.

On Thursday in nine-month-contract land, I worked from 7:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m., and sweetheart, you ain't seen nothing until you've seen me wanting to get all the things done before needing to be out of the office in nine-month-contract land for a week and a half. I am an administrative rock star. I administrate the heck out of work. Projects were zinging back and forth off the walls and into other people's offices; proofs zooming here, final versions swooping there, to do lists shot through the heart with check marks. At the end of the day, I kicked some checklist butt.

And today in nine-month-contract land, because I have an awesome husband with some fantastic friends, I spent nine glorious hours by myself. First, I left my phone downstairs and woke up when my body was ready to wake up. Ahh, I said, rolling over and stretching, is that daylight I see? Time to wake up, tra la, tra la! 

I exercised. No need to look at the clock-- there's nowhere else to be, sister. Just lift your weights. Just run on your treadmill. Then walk back home, because no one is waiting for you, so you don't need to drive the quarter-mile to and from the gym, there's all the time in the world. Take as long as you want in the shower. Drink some coffee. Switch a load of laundry. Type a while on the computer. No hurry. No worries.

All of that anxiety back in May about whether or not we could make it on two-months-less pay, and this is what I get? Relaxation and sunshine with my family?

What a waste of emotional energy.

"There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Mahatma Gandhi

Advent Day 15: And There Were Shepherds

Dad and I sat on the tailgate of his truck and waited.  The night air was warm enough to be out without a coat.  The old maple on the hill cast a dim shadow from the light of the moon.

"Oh! There's one! Did you see it?" I asked, pointing to the sky. The meteor shower was supposed to be clearest in the darkest of night.  It was still early, by that standard, but already the falling stars had begun to dash across the sky.  Each one sent a jolt to my heart.  "Wow," I said.  "So beautiful."

The tip of Dad's cigarette glowed orange in the night.  He took a draw and then exhaled the smoke off to the side away from me.  Summer's night sounds surrounded us, a silence that was everything but silent, a silence whirring with the hum of insects, the rustle of summer leaves, our breathing in and out.

In the middle of the silence, we watched the sky and waited for more flickering, fleeting glimpses of a space beyond our world.

"And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.'" - Luke 2:8-12

Advent Activity: Lingro Family Christmas
We are heading up north to celebrate Christmas with my mom's side of the family, and I am roasting my first turkey.  Yee!  Wish me luck; it's a 20 pounder.

Book Seven 2012: Townie by Andre Dubus III

Townie by Andre Dubus III is the kind of book you can't help thinking about when you aren't reading it.  You live in its scenes while you are eating dinner with your kids or riding in the car, thinking about the narrator, wondering what is going to happen next, considering the plot development and the foreshadowing and how successfully the author ends chapters.  You find yourself missing what your husband said because you are still lost in the mill town bar fights, the father/son storyline, and the coming-of-age hunt for identity.

I was hooked from beginning to end, couldn't fall asleep last night until I finished it off.  What a book.

On top of the thrill of a great read, Dubus is going to be here for the Ashland University summer residency at the end of July.  And, a piece by him about writing memoir will be included in the next issue of River Teeth. I am one lucky gal.

I'm not sure what I'm reading next off of my 30th year book list.  After reading such a great book, it is hard to jump into another memoir, so I think I'm going to read some poetry for a bit.  I'm also reading a manuscript for a friend and want to dedicate some time to it this week while I am off of work. 

In the back of my mind is the hope that I'll also find time to write this week, maybe in the evenings after the kids are in bed, but I'm also aware of the kids laughing in the backyard pool, painting projects here and elsewhere, and the need to clean - laundry, dusting, bathrooms and all of the other chores that fall to the wayside for too long.  At the end of the week, BW and I are going out of town for a weekend, alone, by ourselves, without children.  Maybe then?  Probably not.  I have plenty of other things in mind for a weekend alone with my husband.

I might not be able to get the words on the page this week, but I am promising myself to at least think about the next essay, and maybe jump in next week, when we're back to the normal schedule.

For now, I'm going outside in my bathing suit with the kids to enjoy the non-writing hours.

Family Vacations, Then and Now

This weekend marked the first family vacation with my side of the family since the Great Myrtle Beach Thanksgiving Vacation Disaster of 2007. None of us said anything to reference it, but as we set up our campers at the state park on Friday night, cold wind whipping across the lake and blowing in heavy bursts of rain, I'm sure we were all thinking of it.

Back in 2007, my husband and my mom set out around 8 p.m. on the weekend before Thanksgiving with the hopes that our potty training 18-month-old daughter and 3-month-old son would drift off to sleep shortly after leaving, and they could drive through the night, arriving in the sunny Carolinas around breakfast, a bright November sun burning off the fog in the foothills, and two well-rested children slowly stirring in the back seat.

Instead, the two kids took turns keeping the other one awake, Lydia crying every time they drove under a row of streetlights or caught the headlights of oncoming drivers heading back the way they came.  Brandon and my mom took turns trying to pin clothes to the window to block the lights, played music, didn't play music, sung, gave bottles over the back seat, anything, anything to get them to sleep.

Meanwhile, I was at home, sleeping soundly in my empty house and bed after spending most of the night painting the living room red.  I stayed behind because I had just started my job at the University that fall and for some reason I decided that my five vacation days that year would be best used some other time.  I would work the first two days of the week and then just fly down on Wednesday.  No big deal.

The family van rolled into Myrtle Beach on Sunday, alive.  I flew down to Wilmington from Columbus and arrived at the airport, ready to see my happy family at the beach for a long weekend.  Utopian dreams of previous vacations drifted in my brain, full weeks spent wandering the beach and strolling about with both my side of the family and his, smiling, sunset gazing, sandcastle building, everyone jolly and hugging and wishing it would never end. 

My phone rang as I got off the plane.  It was Brandon.  A deer ran out in front of the van on his way to the airport and the van was undriveable.  A tow truck was on its way.  You'll have to rent a van, he said, we'll get this one repaired and pick it up on our way back out of town. 

Only no mechanics work the week of Thanksgiving.  We'd have to come back for it.

The two of us rolled in to the condo and slipped as quiet as possible into the bedroom, under the blankets, the bed creaking just enough to wake up Lydia.  Mommy?  And then four hours of children awake.

Thus began our Thanksgiving vacation at the beach.  Dad and the boys arrived about the same time as I did on Wednesday and we ate our Thanksgiving dinner together in the condo.  We wrapped up the weekend with a family blow-out and a one-way rental back to Ohio. 

And now.  We huddled around the campfire started with lighter fluid between the two campers, hoods up over our ears to block the wind gusts, and grumbled about the weather with my brother and his wife and my parents while the kids slept in the camper.  Lydia is now six, Elvis almost five and Henry just over a year old. 

In the morning, we cooked eggs and bacon over the fire, still battling the chilly wind.  This figures! I muttered.  Can't plan anything.  We took the kids to the playground, wobbled over the limestone boulders down to the lake side so the kids could throw in sticks, and at lunch we moved the campers to another less windy part of the park.  And then, then it was like the old days - the really old days - of fishing and cooking and roasting marshmallows and cooking hobo pie and riding bikes and making fast friends from the campsite across the way (hello, Lisa).

Only this time, it was me and my family giving it to the kids, my brother teaching them to fish, my husband playing catch with the older two and chasing Henry across the grass, all of us cooking and singing and drinking and eating, and me, grinning like I just caught my first bluegill by the water.

True Confessions

It has been several weeks now since I've written any poems anywhere. I'm pretending that they are stored away in my brain just waiting for a moment to spill out onto the computer screen (because, let's face it, there's no such thing as putting pen to paper anymore). Surely there's some poem floating out there for me to write. Surely.

West Chester's Poetry Conference was good for me - I wrote three poems while I was there and edited a bunch, rearranged the manuscript that promises to never be finished, and devoured the advice and good counsel of other poets who served on panels and participated in the workshop with me. It was a jolly good time. And now. Now, I am all business and no time for writing or reading.

I'd like to take this opportunity to blame the sun. It is clearly the sun's fault that I haven't written anything. Also, the weeds in my flower garden. The caramel-colored paint on the walls in the dining room that insisted on being covered up by "Timeless Taupe," which was delighted to be stirred and rolled across the plaster (I heard it giggle while I worked). The eight games of Lexulous I inadvertently started and will perpetuate as long as my opponents accept. It is also clear that the spray park at the Kroc Center is forcing me to play with my kids in sprinklers all afternoon, thus purposefully distracting me from all poetic pursuits.

I will not be held responsible for the lack of poetry being generated today. Nope.

This obvious attempt by everything in the universe to divert my attentions away from rhyming couplets and iambs will continue throughout the weekend and at least another week. And then, the summer residency begins, and I will be surrounded by a legion of writers armed with laptops and collections of poetry to battle against the outside world. Writer's boot camp will at least inspire me to write something. Or drink. One of the two.

The Corner Stand

The Corner Stand


The pick-up’s open tailgate displays
the fruits of our labors – bushel baskets
of fresh-picked sweet corn, Sugar Baby
watermelon, zucchini, yellow squash,
tomatoes, green bell and banana peppers
all arranged in quart containers.

It is unpredictable at the corner stand –
will passersby, hankering for a dozen,
see our shining vegetables, mouths watering
for a taste of straight-from-the-vine
cherry tomatoes, pull in or drive by?

Fishermen steer into the lot towing a boat
off Lake LaDue, a long sunburned afternoon
on the reservoir rewarded with a few Bluegill.
They admire the way we’ve displayed our corn,
tassels up, baskets full, pull over
for a few ears on their way home.

We polish the dirt off cucumbers
til they shine, rake footsteps away
from in front of the stand,
chase the shade of an ancient maple,
turn the ignition and pull forward,
scrape the red awning across dirt.
We straighten the tablecloth.

It is a weekday – the rusted truck bed
does not empty. The sun dips low
behind the hill. We count the number
of cars that do not stop. The red F-150
extended cab with Edison Marine
in tow returns, demands whatever we have left,
no matter the price – there’s a bon fire

down the street – big shindig – dinner’s
a clam bake, family style. We unload
our bushels into brown bags, stack
them in the bed. They write a check
and then they’re off, leave our little stand
in the dust, a slim day suddenly jolly.

We cross the street to the Inn, buy
a couple burgers, French fries and Pepsis,
celebrate our long day at a booth in the bar.
Tomorrow is Saturday; we will pick
two truck beds’ worth, enough
for weekend cook-outs, pool parties,
weddings, baptisms, funerals.
We will feed the masses.