Here is our home, open for you and your children
Here is our dirt
it is everywhere
It’s piled in the parking pad, odd looking weeds growing in clumps of discarded soil
One of them sprouted moonflowers
open in the evenings
By early morning they are thinking about closing their trumpets again
Here is our dirt inside
Shoes for tripping
Frisbees for slipping
Brooms for dragging around the house, drooling
Filled with joy at the thought of walking and carrying a big stick
Here is the kitchen
piled with tomatoes
Tomatoes ready to eat
Tomatoes ready to hurl, rotten, at the groundhog
spewing the juices I should have captured in a meal, in the freezer
Tomatoes on all the surfaces I need for preparing other food
Other meals
the endless litany of lunches
So when I get a quiet moment to sit
in the midst of my dirt in a ray of sunshine
and eat a tomato that hasn’t yet turned to puddle
I sit in gratitude for all the friends who are willing
Willing to shovel a spot for their offerings
past the tomatoes on my kitchen altar
over the broom now discarded across the threshold
slipping on the frisbee omnipresent
Even now as I contemplate
our wild disarray
I may be learning to
love
this way
