Today I watched my younger daughter — the one I used to call “Small One” in all my online posts — the one who is officially, and will always be, my baby — fight fires. No, really. She is in training to be a certified firefighter and EMT by the time she graduates from high school. So she and her cohort gather on the occasional Saturday and practice connecting and priming firehoses, battering down locked doors, donning oxygen masks, entering dark houses, dragging victims out into fresh air. It is thrilling and impressive and kind of scary to watch.

You can scale the walls
break the windows, staunch the blood.
You can fight fire.

I can’t believe it’s nearly the end of April.
I can’t believe we’re a third of the way through 2018.
I can’t believe I’m 51.
I can’t believe it’s almost summer.
I can’t believe my girls are grown.
I can’t believe how much there is to do.
I can’t believe how much I’ve done.
I can’t believe how time flies.
I can’t believe how time stands still.

The bridge holds morning
safely, like a turtle shell.
I watch it pass by.

No picture today. It was just that kind of day.
An at-least-we-all-made-it-through-to-the-end-still-alive kind of day.
A Thursday-that-felt-more-like-a-Monday kind of day.
You’ve had that kind of day, right?
Still, there was time to scribble down a haiku.
I’ll call that a success.

Alarm rang early
and all day aspired toward
jarred spaghetti sauce.

It is a rare Wednesday when flowers arrive at your door, and a rare friend who sends them.

Oh, ranuculas!
Rosy cheeks and handkerchiefs
can make a girl swoon

One of the ways my younger daughter and I are a good fit for each other?
Cards. Well, actually, lots of other games, too, but cards are most often at the ready.
During this year of nearly empty-nesting, we sometimes make-up for empty spot at the dinner table by playing cards as we eat. It’s not fancy, but we don’t care….

I was sure I’d won,
flicking cards down fast as wings.
You’re a lucky draw.

Sometimes hope beckons
at the end of a long day —
better than sunrise

Happy Earth Day, everyone.
(Also, every day is earth day.)

Some assignments, meant lovingly of course:

Go outside. Hike. Ride a bike. Hang a hammock. Take your dog. Take a picnic.

Read books about going outside. I know — read some of my books! (In the Canyon, All the World, Another Way to Climb a Tree, Kate, Who Tamed the Wind — I really like going outside and writing books about going outside.)

Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle.

Read this fascinating article about carbon farming (that just so happens to feature children’s author Peggy Rathman.

And then go outside again. Seriously.

Today is Earth Day
I press my hands to the ground
feel this life-green song

I’ve just spent the weekend at the Poetry at Round Top poetry festival, where stories, voices and language are lauded… where connections between words and people are made… where storms knock the power out and people just think, “What great material!”

People read poems
aloud to one another —
the sky’s full of light!

In this season of pain and protest, I have been watching my kids and yours with awe and admiration. Their rallying cries, their impassioned pleas, their lifted voices, their posterboard signs — they are using language to try to make sense of the nonsensical, to speak truth to power, to reveal their hearts and minds, and then to disrupt, teach and influence by way of those revelations. They are poets, of the highest order.

Unexcused absence
It is safer to walkout
than to hide inside.

They’re not asking much —
is it really outrageous?
They don’t want to die.

I have this special thing I do once or twice a week.
I mean, really special.
I get to volunteer in the newborn nursery at the hospital, you guys.

I do some important but boring stuff, like re-stock diapers and run blood down to the lab, but do you know what I mostly do? I mostly swaddle babies and rock them, feed them a bottle if they’re not nursing, give them their very first baths on planet Earth.

When I first started, I would look around like, What? Are they seriously going to let me do this? But now, I just find it the most absorbing thing. It’s like a mediative practice, honestly, being with each baby in each moment. It may well be the most present I am with anything all week.

Oh, also?
I wear scrubs, which is kind of fun and very funny…

Baby, who are you
inside swaddle, under hat?
Skin, hair, breath, cry, heart.