“Sun makes the day new.
Tiny green plants emerge from earth.
Birds are singing the sky into place.
There is nowhere else I want to be but here…”
~ Excerpt from “For Keeps,” Joy Harjo

Currents emboss ripple trails over the sand until the next tide will wash them away again. I walk, later than usual, onto the cloudy beach. I have finished preparing for the Wednesday morning writers. We will meet in our online Writing Studio across the miles. I have prepared a writing prompt on love. I have asked them each to “bring” something in the shape of a heart. I have shaped the prompt around four poems: Carol Ann Duffy’s “Valentine”: “Not a red rose or a satin heart./I give you an onion./ It is a moon wrapped in brown paper…”; Michael McFee’s “Valentine's Afternoon”: “Four lanes over, a plump helium heart— /slipped, maybe, from some kid's wrist/or a rushed lover's empty front seat…”; Rumi’s “What Was Told, That”: What was said to the rose that made it open was said/ to me here in my chest…”; and Joy Harjo’s “For Keeps,” excerpt above. As we meet, I close my eyes, I ask the writers to close their’s too, and breathe deeply, and I feel us sitting together in the writer’s studio, I feel the beam of sunshine pouring in through the large paned windows. Sun is shimmering the pond ripples. We are, as we always are, breathing the same creative-sparked air. The writing, and the sharing, is deep and ripe and exquisite. Earlier, I find a lively bird’s beak sculpted in driftwood. A snowy egret feeds on the shore and lifts off. Seaweed is the charmed color of a cheerful plump red balloon. Later in the afternoon, I ride my bike to the post office where the postal workers are patient, so patient, with every elderly person they wait on ahead of me in line. I am patient too.