--THINGS COULD BE WORSE AND THINGS COULD BE SO MUCH BETTER

…For whatever reason, a lot of people’s pets died today.  Or so they’re saying on Facebook.  I understand how sad that must be.  I’d be miserable if anything ever happened to my sweet little Lucy.  Still, I don’t think I’d share the news.  Seems like a pity grab.

…I live in the boondocks (now there’s a word you don’t hear anymore).  The nearest grocery store (or food store, as they say on the east coast) is fifteen minutes away.  All the phone and power lines are above ground, sagging from slanted poles and there are thousands of old trees which occasionally (especially in winter when it snows, or during windstorms) crack off limbs which in turn fall on the power lines taking the power out with them.

That was the case this week and last week two.  Outages this early are pretty rare.

Yesterday the internet went out.

Sometimes there’s something to be said for living through an outage.  I’d find myself still flipping he light switches, which just goes to show how a person can take having power for granted.

When the kids were still here and we’d have an outage we’d light candles and get out the lanterns and play board games.  The kids actually looked forward to it.

Yesterday, with no internet, I wrote a ton of poetry.

Here are two (the first is all true and the first half of the second is true)

Strawberries

So much to say about the taste of a strawberry

How it takes me back to age nine

My first time working the fields

With all the Hispanics

Knees on the hard dirt and rocks

For hours

Clipping berries from stems

Picking as fast as I could

Filling flat after flat

Until the heat broke one hundred

And the foreman called it quits for the day

While we lined up like prisoners

Around the back of a pickup

Handing over our punch cards which showed

How much we’d picked

And getting cash for it

Bills discolored from berry juice

Looking blood-stained

The same way my fingers would until Fall

Me not caring one bit

Because back at home

In our trailer

As my parents went at each again

And my brothers turned up the TV

To override all the screaming

I lay in my bunk

Thinking about the rest of the summer in the fields

And the summers after that

About how much I’d pick

How much I’d make

Feeling I could be rich

And maybe

Just maybe

Make a new life for myself someday

Prison

I remember the day my brother got out of prison

Dad driving his ’63 Cadillac convertible with its chrome-tipped fins

The top down though it was dusk and windy and bitter cold

My step-brother in the back seat next to me

Yelling, “Floor it,” while Dad obliged

Though he’d been drinking earlier

Mom riding shotgun

Wearing a headscarf like her idol Grace Kelly

And cat-eyed glasses

Cigarette smoldering between her lips

Me wondering how it would feel to kill someone

Even on accident

Then being locked up all those years with nothing to do

But wrestle with shame

We’d switched towns after it had happened

But when my girlfriend found out

She broke things off

Others knew soon

I was a killer’s brother

And school was torture

At the prison gate we waited for hours

Until near midnight

He strolled out

“Aren’t you even going to give me a hug?” he said

“I don’t bite,” he said

I never did ask him how it felt

What it was like to be locked up

But tonight after I pick up my Dad from the same place

I’ll make sure he tells me how

It was for him