I know how the flowers felt

“The rain to the wind said,
You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged--though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.”
― Robert Frost

I've had times in my life that this poem suited me so well that the words would ring in my head, day after day.
Towards the end of this day, as I picked my grandson up at preschool and we raced through the garden to the parking lot above, I stopped to look at these daffodils and take a photo. We've always joked, they are the family flower...the Daffy-Dills. What I have learned to realize is the flowers are not dead. They manage to rise again to another day and recognize that this too shall pass.

Marie Colvin 12 January 1956 - 22 February 2012

Marie Colvin was the kind of woman I wanted to be. Married three times, twice to the same man and once to a dashing Latino who was said to write like an angel in his native language, Marie Colvin was an Ivy League girl who jumped right into life shortly after she tossed her mortar board in the air at Yale. I loved her. She was tough, she was brave and she was immensely talented. Her writing, speeches and reporting were inspiring to the point of humility.

[She was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents.] Roy Greenslade guardian.co.uk Marie Colvin obituary

When I read Helen Adams in the Lotus Eaters, it was easily Colvin who I imagined, without the eye patch. But Helen was fiction and Marie was not. Helen walked down a long road into the future. Marie is gone and remembered today.

I heard the news this morning while I was driving to work and it hit me like a piercing. The grief I experienced over journalism’s loss of Marie Colvin wasn’t something I could share; I kept it closed in my chest somewhere and felt it like a ball of heavy smoke all day.

In Memory of Dad 17 January 1905 - February 11, 1985

Twenty-Seven years ago today
Dad slipped away
In a manner not to his custom…
Quietly, with little fanfare. We’d fluttered
in and out of the room
saying goodbyes and laying our cheeks
next to his
unwilling to let him go yet granting him
his leave
because it was the noble
thing to do.
When he was gone my brother
keened and I
gathered sheets
and made mom tea.


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River Stone

stones in the river

gone for the ocean…

like words I search

to remember time,

place

seeking

one stark obsession

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Calling Stone

Call me out across the field
With abandon you will
Arrive upon my crumbling step
At last
We’ll close the door
Behind us
Just for the day

Memory Stone

There were things on Kathryn’s table;
I knew each small pile had a story.
I could have stayed all night to listen.

Book Stone

I found these books for you today
I tried to tell the man about our past
He’d heard it all before


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