The breath of life is in us as we look toward
embracing the challenges that lie ahead
but that new day never comes.

My faith tells me that the angels come from the
heavens to lift us and take us to the next stop
in our journey, a land of peace and serernity.

This painting of the heavens eases the hurt
and grief faced by those who remain in this
earthly life.

I wake and think I’ll watch the sun
rise over the ocean and wait
until a message in a bottle
beaches in my mind.  

The rhythm of gentle waves
unmoors my boat.
Only water, only sky –
the world has become large  

I hate crows,

I have to say,

They eat my corn,

Then fly away.

Then perch so high,

On overhead limbs,

While I fume and fuss,

And cuss at them.

They set up there,

Above it all,

And laugh at me, 

With their “caw, caw, caw”.

In fits of rage,

My thoughts run toward loaded rifles,

Poisoned fields,

Traps and trifles,

But I remind myself,

Of what I’ve heard,

How they are such,

An intelligent bird.

No doubt, ‘tis true,

As one can see,

I’ve no doubt,

They’re smarter than me.

But I look back,

To those long gone,

How they and these birds,

Once got along.

I’ve heard and read,

How the Cherokee,

Built for themselves,

Bird effigies.

And how these wise,

And wondrous birds,

Avoided fields,

Bearing those interred.

So, with a plastic bag,

Of the blackest sort,

I made a crow,

Which I would disport.

I hung him there,

By his limp fake heels,

As a warning,

In my growing fields.

And I must say,

Much to my surprise,

The crows all gathered,

Before my eyes.

And sang a dirge,

For their long lost kin,

Born from the lining,

Of a garbage bin.

But my boundaries now,

They did respect,

And their o’rehead flights,

They did deflect.

I’m glad to learn,

Of the elder’s ways,

And that I may now,

Here sing their praise.

And I toast the wisdom of birds,

That all may know,

In the end, perhaps,

I do like crows.

not an unknown place  this 
as the deep sea  the edge of space  the vast unknowns humans conjure 
what do we truly grasp?
here  today  I stand 
halfway to where I began  so many years ago 
a child
still

wonder strikes me  sharp and clear   the height  the breadth  the boundless sky 
just as it must have pierced my fresh young eyes 
the rocky expanse  a ridge thrust straight from the earth  snow-dusted divides in June

a child of mine has returned to my original nesting ground  so I visit
and this  too then  one of life’s true wonders  this return seen through another’s life 
a gift to savor   in the weight of age  or perhaps because of it

I haven’t been one for looking back
labeling it reminiscence  nostalgia
my feet favor forward
so this  too  a marvel

is this a link   a profound connection  a marvel mindedness
we humans
unique  or are we
procreation begets awe
to revisit  to revise as the feet keep walking
and wonder

I thought once again as I occasionally do on bad days
about how in five billion years or so
the sun will expand & become a red giant
engulfing Mercury & Venus & perhaps Earth
toasting our planet like a marshmallow in a campfire

& assuming the human race
hasn’t figured out interstellar travel & colonized the galaxy
having deserted the husk of this once so beautiful
blue speck in space
in search of new worlds to despoil

& assuming that technologically superior & weirdly altruistic aliens
have not arrived deus ex machina  
to whisk us away to some new paradise

& instead we have long since left the building
our best efforts to overcome our rapacious nature
& secure the longterm survival of our species
a total bust

for the first time ever I shrugged my shoulders
& said So?

That part of heart and soul 
separated from our 
entangled lives enrolls 
in school to chart her course.

That eighteen year old girl 
now freely goes, empowered,
and we hope that any 
spooky action at a

distance will still set off
alarm bells when needed. 

I              remember                                         

                                      days

          composed                  of

                          the Dark Continent

                                    of
                                                     love

and                                             
    
                                                the map

                        of
                                                   leaving.  

~ An erasure of Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, page 8

What’s afforded the world 

After twenty-two years, I am no longer the hum of pressure gauges,
no longer the one they call when systems go rogue
or bolts seize in winter wind.
I’ve been dismissed by silence.

I was a field-cat—fierce, functional, sun-scarred—
built for rooftops and trenches,
for pipe rooms soaked in ammonia, steam, and resolve.
Now the mission’s done.
I walk out past decontaminated gates
and the sun feels like a stranger on my skin.

The offer hasn’t come yet.
I circle the edges of myself,
drag one paw across a department store mirror
where soft things hang like questions.

I shop—not for style,
but for camouflage, for courage,
for garments that might coax me forward
through the fog of beginning again.

At sixty-two, your skin no longer snaps back.
But it remembers:
hard hats, steel-toed boots,
safety briefings at minus seven degrees.
It remembers building systems that kept acid from the earth,
standing in trailers, back straight, voice precise.

But now, the uniform must change.
It must soften.
It must learn the language
of conference rooms and corner desks.

I shop for cardigans as if they are lifeboats.
I test the weight of navy fabric.
Will this make me look capable—
or like I’m trying too hard?

I shop for blazers that might bandage the ache,
wrap my fear in neutral tones.
A silk blouse that whispers instead of declares.
A pencil skirt that won’t expect to kneel.
Shoes made for carpet, not concrete.

I joke—“I’m becoming a house-cat”—
but even that laugh is brittle,
like a cracked flange,
like loneliness beneath fluorescent light.

You’re not wrong to grieve, I tell myself.
The cocoon between what was
and what could be is tight.
Suffocating.
Necessary.

You built systems to protect others.
It makes sense
that losing yours
would leave you unmoored.

A new place calls with its title,
with its silent subtext:
reinvent, adapt, begin again.

So I reach for house-cat clothes.
I want to be ready.
I want to be liked.
I want not to fail.

Behind the humor is ache—
a longing to walk into a room
and not feel like the oldest one there.

To be respected
not just for my résumé,
but for the voice honed
in steam and silence.

I fear I won’t belong.
I fear forgetting names,
systems,
where the coffee is.

Let me say this gently:
This war inside the mind—
between the sharp-clawed survivor
and the card-carrying colleague—
doesn’t mean I am broken.
It means transformation.

The field-cat inside still watches,
wary beneath the desk of imagined future.
It does not trust chair wheels
or breakroom banter.
It misses blueprints
smudged by cold hands.

But there is something else:
a pulse beneath the fear.
A kind of molten readiness,
wound tight through the core.

I think of the math students I taught—
the ones who came after graveyard shifts,
still hungry to solve.
That part of me breathes still.
Still wants to teach,
to mentor,
to light sparks
engineering never snuffed out.

Something new is stretching beneath my ribs—
not weakness,
not surrender.
Curiosity.
And a quieter kind of courage.

There’s fear, yes—
of acronyms I don’t yet know,
of lunches taken alone,
of bringing too much of the past
into rooms that never knew my name.

Let the grief speak.
Let the rage against softening breathe.
But don’t let it drive.

The field-cat was your origin,
not your cage.
There is dignity in this house-cat life, too—
in mentoring,
in troubleshooting with words
instead of torque wrenches,
in saying, “I’ve seen this before.”

I used to buy boots by ASTM rating.
Now I’m hunting for cardigans
that suggest competence
without intimidation.
Shoes that speak in boardroom dialects,
not the clipped cadence of fieldwork.

It is sacred—this shopping.
This ritual of readiness.
Try them on not to erase yourself,
but to honor the version
still growing teeth in the mirror.

Let the house-cat skins drape gently
until the room feels like a system you’ve balanced before.

I press the sleeve seams flat,
pull back the curtain, and try it on—this next self—
a woman who’s been through the crucible
and come out not diminished,
but re-formed.

You are not the role the mirror tells me.
You are the one who makes roles matter.
And whether you crouch in boiler rooms
or conference calls,
you are still the same woman
who carried pressure and flame
with grace, with fury,
with purpose.

What if the job becomes real?
What if the office door has my name?
What if the drawers rattle open
not with bolts and torque specs
but fine pens and annotated process maps?

Still, fear lives in the seams.
What if I am too slow,
too “former” for the pace?

Afraid of a new town too—
of the moving truck’s hollow echo,
of no floorboard creaking in welcome,
of morning coffee without the hum
of the plant behind it.

This isn’t just a job change.
It’s a shedding of skin.
And some skins we wear so long
they feel like bone.

What if they don’t see
what twenty-two years of doing the impossible
has made of me?

But deeper than fear is something else:
a thrum.
A system warming up.
Not combustion.
Not turbine.
But reinvention.

I know how to build
what doesn’t yet exist.
I know how to walk into cold,
cavernous spaces
and coax them toward breath.

I know how to teach.
For ten years, I taught math
to dreamers in denim and hoodies,
made them love eigenvalues,
showed them the curve of a wing in calculus.

That part of me is alive.
Still eager to mentor.
To steady a hand.
To leave behind more than deliverables.

Even in those long years at the plant,
I was evolving.

So buy the pants.
Buy the soft shoes.

Fold the tags
like prayer slips
into your purse.

And let the house-cat rise—
not instead of the field-cat,
but beside her.
Together.
Complete.