If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Clouds. Beautiful clouds on the river as the dogs and I walk early. What’s new: I go through the meadow and find swamp milkweed, which grows in the wetlands and blooms a bit later than the common milkweed. It makes me feel very happy. My walk before the milkweed is a bit moody. I’m a bit sad. When I see the milkweed, and then the bright yellow swamp candles, I’m cheered up. As O’Keeffe says, in this quote I find later, after I’m home, seeing the flowers, looking at them, taking their picture, this is completely preoccupying and it’s pure joy, and this is the gift I give myself every day. Be here now in this beauty and happiness. I head home, looking forward to a Zoom session with a writing client I meet with first thing Tuesday mornings. She is transforming her life through writing her blog, and this work with her is also pure, creative joy. And after that, there is an e-mail from my publisher, Michael McInness of Nixes Mate books. My third poetry and prose collection, girl in tree bark, is live and for sale on their website here. I do not yet have a copy in my hand but will soon. It was just about one year ago exactly that I was invited to submit the manuscript after reading a sampling of the new poems in Somerville at a poetry reading. By September I had finished the manuscript and sent it, fingers crossed. By Christmas, I got the acceptance. I appreciate very much that I have three wonderful back cover endorsements from poets/writers I admire. I remember how intimidated I felt when I was new to the poetry world, having crossed over from playwriting, and my first chapbook, All These Cures won a contest with an offer for publishing, and I had to find cover blurbs for poetry. Once I figured out who to ask - (and I tried a couple of well known poets who didn’t know me and never responded) it scared the heck out of me to ask and it worked out very well for me then, as now. I’m so grateful to Donna Baier Stein, Tom Daley, and Jonathan Starke for their thoughtful and generous comments. Donna, who is publishing two of the poems in Tiferet, writes:

With a poet’s ear and a photographer’s eye, Kelly DuMar has crafted richly detailed poems that capture life’s ordinary moments and turn them into something extraordinary. The language in this collection is stunning and rewards multiple readings of each poem. From a mother wrapping her children (the tribe of the poet and her siblings) in winter warmth so they will be “giddy, winging, weightless” to “scattering a parent’s ashes as the adult children “move out from under his cloud,” both loved ones and the natural world are vividly brought to life and raised in transcendence.

--Donna Baier Stein, Publisher of Tiferet Journal and Author, Scenes from the Heartland

It’s a quiet joy today. Nixes Mate is having a book release for me in Boston- the date is in July, TBD. I hope to know soon. In the late afternoon, I ask Frank if we can go get some plants. He agrees! I’m in the middle, still, of mulching and weeding in lots of areas around the property, but I need more perennials for the meadow. And we buy two crab apple trees which delights me. One for the front yard, one for the back. And the perennials are on sale. I buy yarrow and black-eyed Susans and phlox, and we get all this in my car, even, and Charlie and Suzi are surprised to ride home squished into their seats underneath trees. It’s light out and warm when we get home, and we don’t want to go in. So we plant. One tree goes in and many perennials, out by the river. Charlie chases a beautiful and bold brown white tailed deer away as we approach the meadow. Thank you Charles. I water the new plants with buckets of river water. In the next two days the muck I have to cross to get to the river will be completely dry and the grass and weeds will quickly grow in. It’s going to be HOT. The sky is turning pink and blue. The mosquitos come out. We go in. I keep thinking I have my Wednesday morning writers tomorrow. Instead, I will have another tree and flowers to plant and watering to do as the sun rises.