On weekends, I work at a halfway house for sober living. The women demonstrate fierce will in overcoming addiction, but there’s also pain and restlessness amidst power dynamics and hierarchies that I have difficulty understanding.
Mondays find me resetting at Lake Michigan. Water has always been integral to my peace and the great lake’s current is a salve.
I walked the length of the beach today and collected stones and a shell shard. When I was young, my family rented a weekend cabin on Lake Platte in Michigan, and I spent my days crouched on a boulder in the lake, watching the fish and searching for treasures to snag. That meditative process of combing for bits of natural beauty still soothes my nervous system.
In my twenties, I moved to a new apartment every six months to a year. I was hungry to experience new cities, new neighborhoods, and new roommates. I whittled my belongings down to one carload—giving away furniture, decorations, and other temporary, unnecessary things with each move.
Then I switched course and maintained a stable base. I began the process of accumulation, trying to fill the empty spaces left behind by people and values lost.
Recently, I collected branches for a mixed media project and released the ones unused back into the wild. I wrote a long Substack post then deleted it in error. Sand slips through my fingers—all the treasures I collect on a minuscule scale; nothing ever belongs to us.
In my safe at home, I keep my passport, my naturalization papers, and a batch of pocket poems. I would make them every year for my son and his classmates when they were young. The Owl and the Pussycat; The Rum Tum Tugger. Then, when they were a bit older: maggie and milly and molly and may; The Jabberwocky; El monte y el río.
Oenophiles talk about mouthfeel. Consumers of poetry could do the same. Consider the feel of E.E. Cummings’ poem read aloud, creating vibration and sound, then words, from the complex orchestration of the lungs, trachea, and larynyx, the palate, lips, and tongue:
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
We collect to remember and it’s the sensory details that linger. Leeks melting in butter. The delicate crackle of paper thin ice beneath boot and a held gaze that feels like home. Small, sweet strawberries picked in June with homemade whipped cream spooned on top. The weight of a sun-warmed stone in the palm of your hand.
Sometimes, we forget what we wish to remember, but we can always return.
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