A Postpartum Check-In and One Word

I just pulled out a calendar and had to count and recount the weeks we’ve been here. We moved in on December 12. That means not quite six weeks. Am I counting right? It seems longer, but makes me feel better about not yet being settled, especially since we’ve seen Christmas come and go and had company for ten days afterward. At one point, ten of us dodged still-stacked boxes.

Six weeks. That makes this kind of a postpartum check-in considering when I last wrote I realized we’d been on a nine-month journey, a pregnancy of sorts.

This morning I slipped outside into a rocking chair, damp with dew though under cover. I thought I saw two rocks in or at the lake’s edge. I wondered if D had decided after all to “decorate” the shore with ones he’s started to remove from the yard. But as dark filled with light, it exposed two brown ducks, floating still as stone. Mottled ducks maybe? See me shrug? They’re small and brown and sweet. I’ll look them up another time.

As the sky pinked up, I could see Moscovy ducks nestled across the lake in the neighbor’s backyard. When we remove the chain link fence that mars my view, they’ll waddle into our yard, probably, and make a mess. Again I shrug. It’s a small price to pay for the privilege of “lakeside” living. I wonder if I’m the only one enraptured with it. I’ve never seen anyone else outside unless they’re letting their dogs out or doing a little mowing or yard clean-up.

Since we’ve been here, I’ve watched the ducks, white and glossy ibis, cormorants (pretty sure–they could be anhingas, or maybe both), herons and egrets enjoy the water. It’s distracting, really. I keep stopping to pay attention to them instead of keeping my focus on what I “should” be doing. And who knows? Maybe one day after we clean up the view, I could be distracted by a giant “lizard” on my patio. The neighbor says she thought there was a baby alligator in the lake last year that’s since gone on its own way or hitched a ride. Oh, and across the tree line behind the houses across the lake that we’ll never step a toe into? That’s the Everglades.

Speaking of light… Tweetspeak Poetry is hosting a discussion on Dark Times Filled With Light, by the Argentinian poet, Juan Gelman–someone I’d never heard of. He survived a horrendous period of state terrorism, though his own family ended up among the “disappeared.”

The Argentina that nurtured the tango, and then “disappeared” its people, became the crucible for a poet. Steeped in the authority of his wound, Gelman’s poems transform the unspeakable into an affirmation that locates light even in the darkest of times. ~ from the “Introduction.”

You should pop over to TSP and check it out.

I’d been considering a word to guide me through 2017. I had flickers of ideas, like maybe “home” for the third year in a row because… new home. I thought about “literary” and “poetry,” but nothing had flashed any signals until Tweetspeak announced this book club. I had to practically shield my eyes from the light of it. So light is the word I’m going to live with this year and explore in all kinds of connotations, from finding light to being light to living light(ly.) Besides, after all, I now live in the “Sunshine State” after living for years in what someone recently called the “Gray State”–or the “Grey State,” the spelling my friend Laurie Klein says she prefers because it just looks colder.

If I can’t find light in the Sunshine State, I’ve got a big problem.