@babka.bsky.social happy birthday, dear friend! sending love and wishes that sweet unexpected moments of tenderness, joy, and hope find you today and throughout the year. may every work in and of your heart be blessed! ♾️ 🌷
sweet sixteen girl
people by now a mile or so downtown, because they had been going steadily while she had been trying to gather her courage.”
— “Pillar of Salt” by Shirley Jackson
“…the panic caught her again and she thought of the people who had been with her when she first started to cross the street, blocks away by now, having tried and made perhaps a dozen lights while she had hesitated at the first;
the best part of checking my oldest child’s work
thank you… her name was Sarah & she really was.
soak it in vegetable oil if you have some, wait up to an hour & gently comb out is what I’m seeing.
“you’ve done a wonderful job raising them.” I answered, “I’m trying,” and she said, “you ARE.” no one talks about how, as an adult, you sometimes only have one person who takes care of you. it was her. I hope she keeps watching over us.
local production of Into the Woods but that the young cast had chosen to play it serious. “how unfortunate!” she said. she asked me about writing (“do you find it cathartic?”) and when discussing a health challenge my children share and how they were learning to accept it, she said,
…
she delighted in me and accepted me as is. in a year that already feels like hell, it’s just too much. she was only 65 and should have had more time, including the retirement she so richly deserved. I saw her just last month and keep remembering our conversation. I told her I had seen a recent
…
someone I love died this week of a heart attack. she was a wonderful, compassionate physician who cared for me for 15 years through many ups and downs and family health struggles. she delighted in my children and accepted their love and homemade gifts whole-heartedly.
…
“This is Fred, and I am the only one who can see him,” Mike said. “I can talk to him all I want. Go away so I can talk to my best friend.” With that, it was gone.
_______
my 7-year-old wrote this tiny gem today ✨
Mike and Fred
Mike was hugging Fred (but if you saw him, it would look like he was hugging nothing). “I love you, Fred,” Mike said. “Ha ha!” said a voice. “Stop talking to the air.”
many blessings on your day today and all of your efforts! break every leg 💗
I turned the corner to check on her and gasped, she was so glorious. #writingtree
a love that needs nothing
in order to love —
no extraordinary gift
or deserving action,
no perfect peace
or favorable circumstance;
a love more powerful in us
to offer mercy
than on our own
we have ever begun to be.
and descending rays
which I have heard are “God’s fingers”.
if those streams of light form a stairway
to the divine ear,
my prayers
(e.g. “just let us sleep tonight, o.k.?”)
may be too primitive to hear,
but they rise, anyway,
in the name of our brother who wept.
kmh 4/16/25
against the resting yellow fields.
the smell of my mother’s perfume accompanies me home,
along with sightings
of painted horses swishing their tails,
a man on his porch in tattered jeans,
a woman eating a donut from a box
on the sidewalk,
numerous cows and sheep,
so lifeless that I feel I am flying —
but to where?
A blackbird does fly over me,
and opposite of where I must go;
I think I am approaching someone
on all fours waving for help
beside the road
as “Hejira” plays,
but it is only a log,
as much as anything or anyone
is ever “only”
“it’s been a hard year, hasn’t it?”
my father said,
and my daughter said, “it’s been five months.”
I say a prayer for a sun-bathing turtle
in the oncoming lane,
stretching his neck out as we often must
to really take in the sky.
the air is so still that a flag hangs
frozen in time,
high water
on a long drive today,
a slanted tree grows in its own direction
from the flooded Illinois plain:
welcome.
there is too much water
among so many late bloomers;
I nurture a hope that the tree
under which I write
may yet enter into spring.
though her delight encompassed
all things.
kmh 12/29/24
which she worried might feel alone
or confused.
now she smiled and for a few moments
became a home
as the creature walked the length
of her arm,
pausing to cool in the pool water
still resting there.
all was well and would be well;
this was “normal” to her
and unsurprising,
it had speckled wings
and landed
on her open five-year-old hand.
it was safe with her.
I only watched, as I often do,
the tiny miracle,
remembering the time
we observed the metamorphosis
of painted ladies
and how she created a picture
of butterflies to be seen
by the first to emerge,
I don’t remember what she looked like,
only her arms pulling me out,
the walk to the car in shock,
and the Fruit Stripe gum I pulled from my purse in the backseat afterward
and tasted as if this had been a normal occurrence or a dream —
being pulled from the crushing
out of “here”.
kmh 12/9/24
