Home: A Love Story

Once there was a child grown
on the edge of fields where she fell
in love with the smell of chaparral and sage,
gravel-pilfered crater of an old volcano,
lake calming the blight
of quarry, alluvial clay and silt
hardened into trails, in grasses
left unmowed, where the dog
rummaged for rabbits. The houses
came closer, coyote tracks patterned
the yards, remnants of night’s
near howling, and once, a memory:
leaving the sensible
streetlamps, the child went
with flashlight and family
to lake’s edge, searching the beam
for a clutch of mallard ducklings
they’d released that day,
after days of keeping the dog indoors,
watching for mother duck
who never showed, ushering soft
peeping into a fruit crate, mistake,
or was it, sending them out un-
mothered, unwild? Still
now, decades on, the child-not-child
feels the lake settling, rising
in the midst of that dwindling
open space, the stars hemming the place
where streets ended, the clicking of bats
overhead, the crickets
sewing themselves to sleep, the dark
lake-not-lake holding them
somehow at home. To carry that
back in the empty box, thumping
the sides of her mind, its subdivisions
still developing.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in this series “280 Words.”