Kinds of Honey

I am lucky to work in an office full of windows. My desk faces a wall of them looking west towards the mountains.

My apartment windows face west, too. And a bit north.

The downside is that I don’t have much sunlight in my life until the afternoon. It takes coffee and, healthier, water to get me woken up without the rays pouring in.

So I crave sunlight. I like to bathe in it. My sister and I both have this little cat-streak. A sunny spot, a cozy corner, we will find and curl up in. Better yet an open meadow. (So maybe I am more dog than cat. This makes me happy.) The flowers and grasses reach up all around and there is a closeness and an openness all at once.

On my lunch break, these warm March days, I go and lie down in the grass on the south side of our building. There is a ditch where grasses and cattails grow, and a railway that has the occasional train rumbling through. I wonder if the engineer sees me. I wonder what he thinks of this young woman in office clothes sprawled out for her thirty-minute late-winter sunbath.

I bet he scratches his head. Or laughs. Maybe both. Maybe he understands.

I go back to work and the sun has made me a promise, it seems. I won’t be an office girl forever. We have an agreement, me and the outdoors, and we’ll be together much more in the future. In the someday that must, that will, happen.

At the twelfth page

she set down the book.

.

Dust.

.

She went to the fireplace

and stood on the

red paisley rug

her socks sliding up

her calf, down her ankle

.

and everything still.

.

No clock ticked,

though she could imagine

it, as she pushed

.

loose strands of hair

away from her face.

The backs of her legs

.

burned. The house

did not creak.

The wind was gone.

.

Even the fire kept low

and dark, the bricks

solid and hot.

.

If this were a fairytale,

a beast or prince or even

a goblin of some sort

.

would break whatever

spell held here. But today

it was – today, only –

.

the girl, the book,

the empty mantle.

A favorite way to end the day is sitting by the fireplace. And my dog lies next to me. I can hear her steady breathing and it reminds me that there is life that loves me in this world.

I draw close to the fireplace because I crave the variations of heat and cold. Coming in from a winter’s walk and feeling, so distinctly, your cheeks prickling into a red flush. Taking a cup of almost-too-hot tea into hands just un-numbing.

I miss this.

Colorado is not cold enough for long enough, on this Front Range where I live. Snow falls and stays in the mountains, but down here it melts almost immediately. I long for my Midwest and its high snowdrifts. Climbing over hills of snow to get to streets and cars. Such is the adventure of this time of year.

I just finished reading an article in Saveur magazine about maple-sugaring in Quebec. I’ve wanted to go sugaring ever since reading Virginia Sorensen’s wonderful Miracles on Maple Hill. The article fully revived that desire . . . right alongside the one to go back to snowier climes.

To get so cold it starts to become unpleasant – and then to go into that hot sugar-house.

What an alive feeling.

The sparkle! The crystals! Snow and sugar. The tingle of temperatures changing. The body adjusting, intentionally adapting to its different environments.

I am a girl of the Upper Midwest. I love my wild winters. Though, I confess, I can only enjoy the cold with enough indulgence in its opposite. So even though it’s a mild season here in Colorado, with change that is less extreme and less interesting, still I am sitting with this fireplace making my shirt hot, and my shirt pressing into my back, and me pulling away just a little from that comforting burn.

And when I go to let the dogs out before bedtime, it will feel good and cool outside. Then into fleece and flannel bedding. And sleep. In warmth and winter.

A white horse

touches his nose

to my shoulder

.

and gives a huff

warm through flannel.

.

I hold out a palm

full of oats. Shuff, shuff.

Softness and skin.

.

Light sifts through his

mane, filters onto my face.

We are quiet, bowing

.

under a close blue sky,

so present to ourselves,

and this gentle being.

Clementines are one of my favorite things about winter. A sweet orange little gift in the midst of snow and root vegetables. They’re one of my “you can’t get it locally, anyway” splurges, joining coffee and chocolate and tea as a thing-to-not-go-without.

I give thanks for the hands in warmer climates that carefully plucked these from the tree. I don’t know the people whose hands have carried this fruit. I hope my dollars reach well, and fairly, back into their lives. What is due, after all, for such a gift?

Supposedly it is possible to grow clementines in colder zones if you move the trees indoors during the winter. These, and lemons, must become a part of my garden. Soon enough. Happy to have big windows in this little apartment.

Good sweetness. Good, dark Lady Jane Grey. Good sunshine.

Good day. All.

Something rollicking or artsy or reflective, all full of its lyrical self, all proud in the blatant un-practical-ness of being a poem. We need these kinds of things in the middle of our work weeks. So you will be getting some, fresh from my fingers, in all the humility of what it means to even try to be a poet.

—

Nest

Somewhere in Vermont

stands a tiny red house

no bigger than a shed

surrounded by snow.

I wouldn’t want to

live there: too cramped.

But wouldn’t a weekend

be good fun, to see how

a winter bird must feel?

— Tucked into the wood

of a tight nest-home,

venturing out now and again

to know the vastness of the

outdoors, the bright gasp of

winter, to roam over-mountain

in the fullness of the air?

Colorado did a crazy thing these past few weeks and hosted a stretch of below-zero temperatures. We all bundled up and I even had to wear my base layers. I wore these nearly every day of the Iowa winters when I was in graduate school – but on this Colorado Front Range I’ve found that they are largely unnecessary.

We shivered our ways to cars and workplaces. I liked the cold that caught in the back of my throat. It was like Minnesota, Iowa, home. This was winter. Everyone else glared.

Now the thaw has come and snow patches are melting. I stood outside my apartment and walked barefoot on the landscaping stones. T. loves the snow but in this balmy February thaw sun-and-wind, she ran around wearing the kind of smile we all want in springtime.

Life is not always sweet. Its bitterness can be numbing.

In the past three days I have learned of a child’s dog getting run over, a family member nearing death, a miscarriage, and a house burning down. Tragedies in the lives of people close to me, or close to those close to me. And today is Valentine’s Day.

Not all hearts are beating red with warmth and good love.

Other times life is just tedious. Striving and striving with little forward movement, much regular frustration. Just being. Doing. Existing. I know this: I am in the very long waiting time now for my own little farm and for my own creative endeavors to reach their colors out into the world, to be greeted eagerly and enjoyed. As a girl this seemed a not-so-impossible thing. As hard as I work now it seems ridiculously out of reach.

But there is sweetness. Not of one kind only – one we pinpoint as romantic love or family – but no, oh no, of oh so many kinds. They can be hard to know when we’re caught in washes of bitterness, but they are there and we can find them.

And this is a blog about that. The sting of hard things given a nod, but the deep and wild flavors of sweetness and light brought forth for joy’s sake. Here comes a collection of words and photos, a seeking into the kind of world I want to inhabit. Here will be the results of imagination and observation and invitation. Let us taste all kinds of honey.

E.