Awake, again, into this week of making new friends, working on our projects, wanting to get to know everyone even more, even better. When I wake at 6 and slip, seamlessly, from bed into warm pool, a new friend is swimming laps beside me. Soon, I am outdoors, climbing toward the sky up the trails to the lookout in the fresh cool air of autumn, looking down. This week is a peak experience of framing my creative life over the next chapter. Tonight, our group sat around a fire kindled in a comfortable room. One of my favorite ways to spend an evening: we each read something we wanted to share for five minutes. I went first and shared three poems and the photos that inspired them: Monadnock, Pinked, and All These Cures. Others read blog posts or sections of their books or short prose and one woman sang an original song and played guitar. Now, I know each person more and still want to know more, because she and he let me see such an intimate, vulnerable creative side.

One of the poems I shared is the title poem of my fist chapbook, All These Cures. It’s about an imaginary grandmother who came to me many years ago in a guided imagery, and how she cured me, and what she left me:

All These Cures

One day you imagine the grandmother you need 

and find her living in a Swedish bakery serving 

tea to customers in wooden booths on wooden 

floors in her sweet and steamy shop where she 

feeds your hunger for cinnamon and vanilla, 

your dream of comfort from butter and baking, 

the yeasty promise of pastry curling and browning.

You ring the bell and a door swings open on 

the ritual you make so she can greet you. If she speaks

Swedish you will never know. Her intuition is precise

and proofed in silence. The blend of tea she serves

you cannot tell. Her cures are brewed in brightly

painted pots, steeped in mystery, poured into China

cups on saucers she sets steaming under your nose.

Her intention is to love you no matter what

and you learn to let that be a nice surprise.

You learn to trust she means what she makes

you feel, warmed and wanted, sweetened

and safely seated, belonging.

Every time you ring the bell a door swings open

and she is there to greet you until the day she doesn’t 

because she is dead. You thought she lived

where she would live forever, but your imagination

means more than that. What she leaves you

is the shop, your place in it, and the mystery

of who you must serve in her absence.

©Kelly DuMar, published in “All These Cures”