I write a “Ghost Girl” poem every year, and this year, it’s a little different. See, one of Lucy’s favorite things to do right now (spooky season or not) is to throw a sheet or blanket or towel over her head – probably one that she stole from the laundry basket or out of the cabinet while I wasn’t looking – and pretend to be a ghost. She walks around going “Boo!” and “OOOoooOOO,” and says, “I’m a ghost!” So, here you go, my sweet girl. This year’s poem is all yours. I hope you like it, you know, one day when you can read.
Blink and you’ll miss me. I’m fast and I’m sneaky, and I know what I want you to see. Some call me the Goddess of Thieves. I sometimes call myself a ghost. Mostly, I’m whatever I want to be, and you better believe it – I can get away with anything!
It’s easy to learn to let things go. I just look to the trees in the fall. They drop their leaves not as tears but triumphs, a thousand little victories scattered across the seasons, a final satisfied sigh before a well-earned rest.
It scares you, doesn’t it? Here in the dark, hemmed in by the damp, whole smell of earth and air and the endless lapping of the water, the spindly fingers of the trees crawling their way up into the night, you feel it, I know, that you’re not alone. Yes, I’m here, and I’ll talk, if only because you want to, though you won’t like what I say. You’d do well to remember, my curious friend, to look beyond your lens and listen past your recordings and truly see – there are worse things haunting this place, terrors more frightening and damned creeping in the shadows of this world, than me.
One day when we’re old and gray(er), I know we’ll look back and say to each other: “Remember 13? We were younger and taller and Lucy was smaller. Here we are now, and I wouldn’t change a thing.”
And anyway, as old and as weathered and tired as I ever get, I hope I never stop looking up at the moon and the stars and the clouds. If I live to 100 or more, I hope I wear every year and line, every scar and gray hair and crow’s foot with all the wonder and whimsy and goddamn I told you so that I earned. Because I wasn’t put on this planet to be quiet as a mouse or pretty as a picture frozen in time. I am a woman and I contain a whole world in me. As much as I was made to nurture and to create and mend, I wasn’t made to bend. I was made to roar. Cover your ears if you think it’s too loud.
I’ve had enough of grief, so today I’ll focus on love. I won’t give time to that moment when you lose someone, when you feel your chest collapse, you go concave and hollow and you know that you’re alone. Because I know love never turns to loved. Gone isn’t lost. That place in your heart isn’t empty. It couldn’t be. It’s just gone fallow, and only for now. Soon, again, it will grow. It will grow new and alive and long, like bright yellow flowers turned royal blue. We become legacies forever and forever and forever and that love will always go on.
Graham’s sweet dad, Bill, my wonderful father-in-law and Lucy’s most beloved Papa, passed away on Saturday at 6:04 p.m., surrounded by his wife of 58 years and his two sons. It happened quickly, though he’d been dealing with some health challenged for a long time. Meg, Graham, and T sat with him until the end, and I’m glad of it. He loved them, he loved all of us, and he would have done the same. He carried kindness, joy, curiosity, creativity, warmth, and a friendly smile everywhere he went. He painted, and puzzled, and loved wine and travel, and swam in the ocean, and never stopped doing the things that mattered to him
He lived. And in his memory, we will, too. Every day. I’ll miss him. I’m grateful that I got to know him, and I’m grateful that Lucy will carry his beautiful legacy.
It’s the waiting that’s the worst – Sleepless nights watching the phone, willing it to ring, or better not to. Those nights aren’t quiet. They’re sitting alone in the silent dark and wondering wondering wondering what comes next. And then the most wrenching thought: When? When? When? No good time. No right moment. Just this: The waiting waiting waiting for the one thing you never wanted.
I saw your wings once in a church surrounding us in prayer – dust in the air and soft golden light, delicate and quiet, shining through leaded glass and glinted panes that we created. But you did it first.
I think this might have been the first poem I ever posted on the blog. I didn’t have a lot of followers then, and I don’t know that it’s gotten a lot of attention. I’m happy to have an opportunity to share it again, thanks to Annie at Tales of a Family, who posted a writing prompt for this week “inviting us to remember the men who shaped our lives – not always through grand speeches or big moments, but through the quiet lessons they lived every day.”
I’ve talked about my grandfather, James, in the collaboration Annie and I have been working on, about how his death prompted me to start my creative journey. But his life inspired me, too. He worked hard, he fought in World War II and lost friends doing it, he loved and supported his family (his wife, my beautiful grandmother and his six children), and he enjoyed the small, quiet moments you can carve out in a busy, not always easy life. He loved fishing, sitting on the porch swing, making music. He taught me to love those moments, too.
So here’s a poem for him, a memory and an elegy, that I’m grateful to revisit, called “My Grandfather’s Guitar.”
My grandfather’s guitar sits in a corner of my study untouched, gathering dust. When I was young and he was already old, it could pull notes straight from the air through his fingers and into my ears. I can hear them, though he is gone and his instrument’s gone quiet. When I was young, not even ten, he’d pick it up and start to play and then I’d go still, stuck to one spot until he was done. My grandfather’s guitar in his hands made magic, but I was too young to understand that music is magic made real for a moment. A fret and a twang and he’d made something that didn’t exist before and wouldn’t again. I sometimes imagine myself back there, wearing muddy tennis shoes with tangled hair, just listening. I can hear it, but no song ever sounds the same twice.
