I stop taking Prozac and remember how to cry.
The vet says my dog is 97 in human years. Yesterday, he made an angel in the first snowfall he ever saw.
An elderly widow has dementia. Her first poem is soft but sturdy. It's the velvet dust on butterfly wings and delicate as dried dandelions. I wonder if it will make her fly.
The Rockefeller Christmas tree this year is a Norway Spruce from Massachusetts. It was planted by newlyweds in 1967, and gifted in loving memory of a sweetheart’s passing. Above the city fanfare, I love to think about those tired, twining roots still sleeping in that quiet Berkshire yard. Their rest is blessed beneath bare feet; waiting and willingly wilting for the soil that calls them home.
In the winter when the skies get too warm above the Salt Lake Valley, its belly fills with smog. My lungs are already tired today from a disease that didn’t exist five years ago. I cough into my coat sleeve as I step outside to a porch steeped in a blaze of setting sunlight. There’s weight in my marvel as I watch our weary world give and give and give her all, while all we do is take.
Someone that I love tells me that during their first panic attack, they believed that they were dying in-between heartbeats. A Snapple cap declares a hummingbird's heart beats 1,200 times per minute. On my grandma's window sill, I saw them sing, saw them flit, saw them sip nectar with their long tunneled tongues. I think of all the little lives those hummingbirds would have in a single day, were that terror true. What lucky creatures to be born so beautiful - again, and again, and again.
I served food to people in a park. A man doing pushups under a tree wants to say a prayer with me before he eats. He asks God to bless the water in our toes. I see the snowcapped mountains shivering to the east and know he's asking not to freeze. My bible is in my mother's attic, but so much holiness is here. I squeeze his hand hard and I whisper amen.
In Nebraska, there is a waxing crescent moon tonight. In the spaces between street lamps on the i80, you can see the far side of the moon is lightly illuminated. The internet says that is the result of "earthshine." We are 50 times brighter in the moon's sky than the moon is in ours. On particularly cloudy evenings in our hemisphere, we shine all the brighter on the moon. I think about how we don't always see ourselves the way that others see us. I think about how we can use our clouds to make light.