This morning I’d like to stay in bed. Its snowing outside and I have to get up and shower and shovel and do the dishes and some other chores before heading off to work. My last indulgence before getting up today is reading Writer’s Almanac, and I’m happy that I did. I’m feeling a lot like the old turtle, on my way somewhere, in the middle of the road, a bit fierce, vulnerable to crushing, knowing if I turn back, I’d likely be here again. I’m leaving the second longest partnership of my life, not a marriage, but a long and strong connection, and right now it feels scary. Poems help, and friends who stop to notice, though they can’t take me off the road. I’m crossing on my own, not the least bit sure where I’m headed. Might as well be a turtle.

Enjoy the poem and your day. All else is good, just a difficult transition once again, sort of stuck here figuring it out before I move along.

My brother is here repairing our bathrooms. He is a trained plumber who once ran a growing plumbing business. I am a single mom who once tiled our bath.

The wall of the third floor bath crumbled slowly, adjacent to the wall I tiled, where the water came out around the curtain. For many years the paint and plaster failed and I thought I should have done better.

Once my son or daughter did a pull up on the towel rod and it fell. Some man then in my life hung it up, patched the holes with spackle, left it that way.

The paint can we found when searching for the color to repaint the bathroom said 99. Fourteen years ago we ripped the roof off our house. The young guys walked the roof with Sawzalls, tore the roof off in strips they tossed to the dumpster in the driveway. They made a master bedroom, a master bath, an office  and a smaller bedroom. Over time our whole family moved upstairs, first the two boys, then the girl when she arrived. The office moved up, then down, then out. Now only the girl and I live there, one brother off to college, the other on the second floor.

In all that time we never repainted. In all that time we never caulked the tub. I had pressed a strip of grout along the line between tub and tile which didn’t hold. Water pooled in the corners, the grout fell out, mildew grew. It felt unclean.

My brother told me it was the first plumber’s fault. He did not level the tub as he should have done.  The thing was never right. It was not my fault.

Since arriving last Tuesday in the middle of the night and finding a flood in my basement as he put his dogs to bed, my brother has been putting my house to rights, draining the water, fixing the pump and pipes, replacinging sections of the crumbling plaster walls with sturdy wood, repainting walls and trim, cleaning, caulking, sealing grout on the tub, installing the old medicine cabinet I bought for ten dollars years ago at the Goodwill, replacing the guts of the broken lamps in the living room.

When I have visitors to the house I apologize. Everything here is broken I laugh, screwing the lightbulbs in to light the room, explaining the holes in the wall.

Today I left an interview with a potential day care family to go to a poetry reading with a stop on the way to drop off a bag at Goodwill. I ordered peppermint alfalfa tea at the recommendation of the barista, with a raspberry almond muffin for dessert. The tea was in a handmade mug and the muffin was on an earthenware plate. That made me happy not to make more trash.

I sat in the back row, second seat in, and as the reading began a woman in a red sweater, the other muffin eater, sat close beside me. A woman with short cropped hair and a stylish fitted striped shirt was reading and when she was done the woman in the red sweater asked me who she was, and I didn’t know, but that she was something Cohen. We smiled, as her poems were good.

Many poets read. I sat in the narrow seat not touching those on either side and watched the expressions of the other listeners, nods of heads, smiles, relaxation, exhalation, often in synchronicity. Poetry does that, moves us that way, literally. The poets were young and old, female and male. There was not one I didn’t like. That may say more about my novice than their poems. I can’t say.

Afterwards, I read poems in the poetry aisle from poets I want to know, Sharon Olds, Jane Hirschland, Tony Hoagland, poets a novice who reads Writer’s Almanac every day with expectation might learn to love. In the end, I couldn’t commit, and chose instead the Cincinnati Review, the lovely book which the reading had honored, and took it to the desk. There the man behind the counter, who I see there often, and who must sometimes see me asked if I had been reading the Tony Hoagland collection, convinced me to take it home, walked me to the shelf, and recommended another poet I might like, something Tate, good for a self-proclaimed beginner. I was too shy for three books in one night, agreed to take a look next visit. Which I will.

As I walked to my car, two slim volumes of poetry in my arms, Ecuadoran bag swinging at my hip, calling my brother who had called during the reading from  the Home Depot where he was collecting more building supplies while I soaked up the poems, I felt myself returning to that self that Tony Hoagland described in his poem, under my arm and in my heart and mind, In Praise of their Divorce. I’ll share it here. Seems poems and poetry readings are the thing for me in times of turmoil, and a little spiritual awakening, if this weekend’s Quaker Meeting is a good sign post. One of the poems tonight said it very well in a line about poetry and science. I wish I could remember it now. Having felt it, I almost feel I do, remember it that is, but the words would be nicer as I could share them with you so you could feel them, too.

Here’s the Tony Hoagland poem. Buy the collection if you dare. Poetry as breaking free, a quiet revolution of the mind, or a balm at the beginning or end of the day or the middle of the night, making sense and connection and meaning when it’s hard to name.

In Praise of Their Divorce

by Tony Hoagland

And when I heard about the divorce of my friends,
I couldn't help but be proud of them,

that man and that woman setting off in different directions,
like pilgrims in a proverb

—him to buy his very own toaster oven, 
her seeking a prescription for sleeping pills.

Let us keep in mind the hidden forces
which had struggled underground for years

to push their way to the surface—and that finally did, 
cracking the crust, moving the plates of earth apart,

releasing the pent-up energy required
for them to rent their own apartments,

for her to join the softball league for single mothers
for him to read George the Giraffe over his speakerphone

at bedtime to the six-year-old.

The bible says, Be fruitful and multiply

but is it not also fruitful to subtract and to divide?
Because if marriage is a kind of womb, 

divorce is the being born again;
alimony is the placenta one of them will eat;

loneliness is the name of the wet-nurse;
regret is the elementary school;

endurance is the graduation.
So do not say that they are splattered like dropped lasagna

or dead in the head-on collision of clichés
or nailed on the cross of their competing narratives.

What is taken apart is not utterly demolished.
It is like a great mysterious egg in Kansas

that has cracked and hatched two big bewildered birds.
It is two spaceships coming out of retirement,

flying away from their dead world,
the burning booster rocket of divorce
                                 falling off behind them, 

the bystanders pointing at the sky and saying, Look.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21768#sthash.NLqAoSse.dpuf

One of my greatest pleasures as a family child care provider and now as a new staff member at the Sudbury Valley School has been getting to know the artists. Early in the week I took photos of a young girl’s attempt to recreate an older girl’s drawing of a rabbit. Over the last month I’ve watched another young guy move from drawing very little to drawing elaborate figures and pirate ships which he has given as gifts and taped all around the walls of the day care.

The last three days of the week I spent at Sudbury Valley, introducing the t-shirts made by me and a number of young artists, displaying the work of three young women on the fronts and backs of two different shirts. Yesterday I helped hang the work of one of them on the wall of the school office, a large acrylic painting she has showed me on her iphone two weeks ago, which I had been thinking of as I drove to school yesterday morning. I also made display boards of the work of all those who entered the t-shirt design contest and hung them on the walls fo the barn for the Coffee House today.

During the day, I often talk with artists, from the clay teacher who comes two days a week to the senior staff person who spends much of her time in the art room to the girl who spends most of her days drawing, painting, and making clay, turned thirteen this week and working at the college level in ceramics, to the three girls who spend much of their time talking to one another while producing drawing after drawing in their ever present sketch pads, to the young girl who wanted to look through the fabric bins again to chose something for a dress, to the young guy who makes airplanes out of paper, tape, and found objects, to the students preparing for shows or taking photographs for the school yearbook or recording the live music performances at the school.

After hanging the art work on the walls of the barn, I had the pleasure of listening to my own children rehearse their performances for today’s show. My son is one of the music show’s producers and my daughter is one of the stage managers. Both spent a good part of the week preparing for the show and will be at school most of the day today, Saturday, setting up, performing, and closing up shop.

While Sudbury Valley and West Family Day Care don’t advertise ourselves as schools for the arts, what I have learned from my many years of interacting with children and adults of all ages is that making art is a basic human need, and that if allowed the freedom to create, people will make art. We sing, we dance, we paint and draw and build and act and perform and make our world in the images we hold in our minds and hearts and hands. Making space for that for the children in our world and beholding and documenting the process as it unfolds are a big piece of what drives me and gives me pleasure and satisfaction in my work and now I think of it, in my personal life, too. I love having children who are artists and getting to know the artist in all the other children and adults I work with, and it’s fun to learn to see myself as an artist in certain parts of my life, too.