#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Recently I put a bunch of family photos on my desk. I, and my kids, keep rifling through them, and they scatter the desktop, catching my attention as I pass. This one caught my attention the past couple of days, and so yesterday I had an impulse to text this to my siblings. It started a very warm and lovely thread; all so glad to see our father, young, thin, smiling, healthy, with Bobby, the youngest of us, enjoying a day on the beach.

None of us has been able to say which beach, which year, for sure. But this morning I was so interested to get the text from Bobby talking about nearly drowning on a family vacation to Nova Scotia: “I got caught by the riptide at Nova Scotia and Dad had to pull me out of getting drowned. I didn't see it coming and didn't know which way was up. It was like being in a dryer rolling around underwater.” This happened to me in Nova Scotia too, but I didn’t know it had happened to Bobby. In fact, I wrote a poem about my own experience, “It’s easy to drown,” published in Sand Hills Journal:

but a miracle or moon power pulled back the sea, pushed me forth into the vast luck of a longer day between foam and sky

“You realize how lucky we were to survive our own childhoods,” Bobby wrote in the text.

I actually have two poems called “It’s easy to drown,” and the second one is about an incident that happened on Martha’s Vineyard, except the drowning ones are strangers, and it’s my husband who is performing the rescue. This poem was just published in Change Seven Magazine:

A riptide’s a river of sea you can’t see
nonchalantly, standing in breakers 

up to your waist, it sweeps you fast far—
whoever you are—a few feet per second 

away. A tide takes what it wants. 

This morning, after a short walk and a short swim, I had poetry workshop. Shared the poem I wrote yesterday and was pleased to hear that it’s working well. I seem to be having impulses that are generating writing that’s working well in early drafts and not requiring a lot of revision. As opposed to the poems I’ve been revising and sending off this week that have been shaped over the course of a year or more and revised and revised. Felt good getting work out there today. What thick and heavy rain today. In the late afternoon I picked a bounty of round, red, juicy, well watered and rinsed tomatoes off the vine. And my cucumbers are making a comeback!