Happy New Year. Please enjoy three spirits I am carrying and will drop somewhere on my way to the end. I mean to take the long way! See you out there.
Iowa
My sister sent me this video of my niece running the bases in Dyersville, Iowa, where the movie Field of Dreams was filmed. My sister drove her husband and daughter to Iowa after Christmas in a bolt from Christmas. The field happened to be on their way to nothing. In the movie, a summer movie, a girl chokes on a hot dog and a ghost saves her. My niece does not choke.
The Pomegranate
This is me, midwinter, after navigating Trader Joe’s. Pomegranates abound at Trader Joe’s if you can find a parking space and enter the store without malice for fellow drivers capsizing your better nature. Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds in hell, which means that she was condemned to staying underground for six months each year with her “husband” while her mother did nothing but grieve her daughter’s absence. So winter is a story of a woman savoring fruit in hell and a mother crying, napping, taking long aimless walks.
Not Snoopy
Every year my neighbor inflates this Snoopy behind their wall.
Every year it renews my sense of a collective lunacy.
A few months ago, in another enclave I love, I walked with a young artist I was teaching. She wept as we walked. Our activity in the one-day writing workshop had opened her to the too-muchness of too-muchness she was carrying. (Writing can do this swiftly depositing you in empty place.) She didn’t talk with me about what was happening in Gaza and her connection there. We walked.
We talked a little.
We walked past a house where a neighbor of hers is deep in an action. He is tearing colorful strips of sail and plastic, tying them to a expanding rigging of painted bamboo around his home:
Is her neighbor building a fortress or a ship?
A string of wishes/prayers?
A singing out to the artists he’s surrounded by?
A Not Snoopy.
Every since it started, it is a thing others wonder about.
It is part. It is playing a part.
The young artist and I rounded the bend from the one-man show. We walked.
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