It's been busy, busy, busy, but with good things. And today it's dreary autumnal weather but at least the grass glows, and if there were leaves on the trees they would be glowing too. It's hard to say goodbye to color, but I suppose I should focus on tuning myself to the gradations of each color that is left: browns, greys, and soon, white. I will turn my eyes to this and try to appreciate what I can.

Of course, if you've seen my house, you know what a task this is for me. Our walls are blue, red, orange, two shades of yellow, green. . .I love primary colors ferociously. Maybe because I grew up watching bougainvillea clamber over trash piles and up hedges all year. You can't beat the colors of East Africa: Flame trees, all orange and red; jacaranda trees with purple trumpets; at school, always the sound of wind in tree branches, and the trees were never bare. Winter is hard. I long for color.

I was talking with a student and a friend this morning about grief--is it a colored thing? It surprises you, catches you like a bucket of water in the face, then sometimes like a wisp of smoke, thin and hard to smell. This student recently had someone who was like a brother die, and she was telling me how grief blindsides her in the middle of class, perhaps set off by a shred of conversation or a comment. I have found this to be true, too--perhaps I was most surprised at Catherine's birthday party back in early fall, when I was setting out plates and organizing food and readying the house for company--I suddenly lost all composure. Of course, I thought afterward, of course. In every previous birthday party for two or three years that I had hosted at my house because Nancy was sick, I would run around before everyone arrived, busy with details, but heavy deep down as I wondered, "Is this the last one?" I wondered that for three years while Nancy was sick. And suddenly, this year, it hit me: a birthday party for a girl whom I love without her mother, whom I also love. I remembered how Nancy always said that Catherine had been born on a beautiful, clear autumn day full of sunlight, a gift child.

Nancy believed in the cloud of witnesses--the abiding presence of those who have gone on before us who now stand all around us, reaching to us in support, celebration, understanding. They are not silent people; we just can't hear them, I suppose. They are much like the trees that circle me in winter time; I long to feel the warmth of their life, long to touch fans of soft green leaves, to sit in their shade. In winter time I remember green, and it is no less real because I cannot touch it. Faith for springtime, for buds opening and the ground thawing, faith that the trees are not dead even though they bow in wind and snow. Color hidden as a bird in a fist, glimpsed if only I could pry up one finger, find sudden joy in red feathers.

My story, Patron Saint of Trees, printed recently in Southeast Review, is linked online at their site, so now you can read it. . .please click HERE.

Braiding

My mind feels like it's stuffed with brussel sprouts, layers upon layers of words and images and shreds of things I'm supposed to remember and ambitions that are airless, unblown balloons.

Bea has burst two balloons in the last week, one because she was upset and banged it down on some pruned Russian Sage and the other, because she was having a lovely time and bounced it off the ficus tree. Only it didn't bounce--it burst and lay on the floorboards, nothing but a scrap of green rubber.

Parents, why do you give your children balloons? Why do you give them ice-cream cones? Who doesn't know the absolute heartbreak of walking out of the ice-cream shop, your heart full of a thousand licks and the thrill of ownership, and plop, on the concrete, melting fast, and your cone is just a cone with a thin ring of milky sweetness. Even those last drops are not sweet anymore; your riches are gone.

As an adult it is hard not to grieve these small losses when the sudden enormity is reflected in your child's eyes. Immediately I say, "Oh, honey, I'll get you another." If only all problems could be fixed so easily.

We spent a wonderful few days with Catherine, Nancy's beautiful daughter. On Saturday morning I braided her hair. It has grown long and lustrous through the late summer. The sunlight slanting through the window caught it, and I thought of the story of Rumplestiskin. The girls ran about the sun room and chatted and laughed, and I sat on the chair and the weight and privilege of brushing another's daughter's hair was full in me. Nancy, if it's possible, let your hands slip into mine as I touch your daughter's hair; let your fingertips feel the tug on her scalp as you draw three growing locks into one braid. Do not leave until the braid is finished, falling and shining down your daughter's back.

Poetry Daily's featured poet, Paul Henry, from Wales:

My window is full of leaves.

My window is full of bare branches today, but for a few last burnished reds clinging to the Japanese maple across the street.

What is it with poets from across the sea? Why do their poems always sound just a bit more luminous?

Read the poem by clicking on "Your Daily Poem" at right. The last stanza filled me with sweetness though the sky hangs with typical western Pennsylvania gloom.

RE: babysitting

Poetry reading tonight. We needed a babysitter. We found one. She wrote asking where our house was. Martin replied:

Super! We live on a hill and in a valley, everywhere and nowhere. On a tree and in an acorn. Squirrel mouth!

She never arrived tonight. I turned on the TV and told the kids not to climb counters or play with matches. I attended the poetry reading. We saved $20.

I just found Bea in her room (where the little angel is supposed to be napping), trying to clean up a sea of baby powder from her floor with a red bandana. And the baroque music plays loudly as she wipes in time to the harpsichord! It's enough to make a mother like me, who has a truck load of work to do, impatient. A shuffle, paper flipped by an imprecise hand. She's reading. Guess that's better than a million particulates in the air. Speaking of which, I wonder if she can actually breathe in there. . .

O blast it all.

Today is the third in a series of gloriously sunny days that peak in the mid 50s to 60s. Bea and I both have colds and were driving each other a bit batty this morning so off we went on a walk up through the neighborhood hills. We stopped for a while at Nancy's house, and I broke some leaves off her kale plants. Bea fanned the air with one; they were riddled with holes but still very beautiful. You can't tell we plucked any; the bushes are so dense and ruffly, planted right at the front step where I often sat with her.

And then I weeded. Nancy would have been sad to see the grass choking her bearded irises--she always gloried in their full, citrusy smell every year. She planted them in a wet corner of her yard along with purple echinacea (coneflowers) and something else feathery and green--fennel, I'm guessing. The echinacea has gone to seed, black spiky balls, and I left those, because I think they look pretty covered in snow. I made a small mountain of grasses and Bea ran up and down the lawn, eating (I later found out) at least one tiny purple berry that I think is poisonous. I watched her for signs of convulsions but she seems to be fine.

It was good to be alone in Nancy's garden with the plants she nested in the ground last spring. I pulled up the dried black stacks of basil, still redolent with scent. Bea picked the last of the tiny tomatoes and ate them and I walked home, the back of the stroller filled with kale leaves, which will be all the sweeter now after the first autumn frosts.

Across the street, a brown circle in the grass where the neighbor's inflatable swimming pool sat all winter. A Japanese maple weeps red on the lawn, the peonies I left in my mind are brown and papery. I need to go outside.

wednesday mishmash

I know this is bizarre, but I'm thinking how nice it would be to lower myself into a cup of hot cocoa, loop my arms around the edges of the cup, and push my face into a melting marshmallow.

Kind of disgusting but o so warm and sweet.

I interviewed two very intelligent zealots today who are leaders in the push for water quality, regulation and rights of land owners. I can't get them, or the issues, or the huge job of distilling almost two hours of interview into a few short columns out of my mind. Even when I was whacking back the hedges today--it was sunny and warm and perfect for outdoor work--my head spun with all I had heard. The chemistry is completely over my head but the urgency of the situation hits close to the heart, or should I say, to my mouth that I open to admit water, which, though it's filtered, is not as pure as I'd like and is certainly not good enough to give to my three daughters.

Sigh. Sometimes I think I was made to be just a poet and fiction writer. This journalism stuff is stretching me like taffy--see? What a terrible simile. It must be the stress.

One last thing. Last night I was taking a shower with the pocket door slid tightly to keep the bathroom as hot and steamy as possible. Suddenly, Elspeth, who was supposed to be sound asleep, burst through making a racket deserving of a large land mammal. "Mommy!" she said, as my precious steam leaked into the cold hallway.

"Mommy, Merry won't read me her WORDS and I want to hear them!"

Elspeth teeters at the brink of elementary fluency and not being able to read like her fourth-grade sister frustrates her sometimes. But I knew what she was talking about--Merry's teeny tiny journal--so diminutive, in fact, that Merry can fit only a few words on each page.

"She doesn't have to read you her words," I called from the shower. "She's writing in a diary, and diaries are private. You can have a diary too if you want, and then nobody can read what you write."

"Merry has a DIARY?" Elspeth was incredulous. "Like from her BOTTOM?"

"Go back to bed, and close the door after you." I had to grin, though--the lowest types of humor never fail to tickle a funny bone, even if its a hidden one you pretend you don't have.

16 oz jar: 13.25

Only three left in stock on Amazon.com.

But I bought mine at $2.50 a jar at Target a week and a half ago. Martin scoffed to see the kitchen counter covered in a small army of Smucker's creamy and chunky. But we'll see who's making fun of whom when February comes and peanut butter is costing us over ten bucks a jar.

Panic struck my peanut-loving heart when my mother arrived two weeks ago and informed me a peanut shortage was just around the corner. The farmers in Georgia did not have a good year.

I love a good PBJ with a glass of milk. I love peanut butter on pancakes, in cookies, smeared on apples. I left a token two jars on the store shelf, but I greedily scooped the rest into my cart. And now I'm glad I did, because the price on Amazon has doubled since I checked last week. Find your favorite peanut butter, people, and stock up. The day of reckoning is near. Read more by clicking: PEANUT BUTTER PRICES SKY ROCKET

World Concern, where my dear dad works, got a pretty great shout-out from the NY Times. Read about the good they're doing through food vouchers in a Somalian town struck by famine by clicking: World Concern

Last night, after the girls organized their heaps of trick or treat candy, Bea seized a Peanutbutter Cup and retreated to her Secret Place. (We trick or treat on Thursday--strange? Yes. It's a town tradition).

Secret Place is behind an armchair in the sun room. It looks as if Merwin the Mouse has taken up residence but it's Bea who discards candy wrappers, hides cell phones, and squirrels away her sisters' small toys.

Elspeth found the orange Reese's wrapper and produced it triumphantly. "Bea stole candy!" she announced, to which I responded with a stock line, drawn from many stock lines that I say to be a good parent even though they bore me:

"Well, since Bea chose to enjoy her treat early, she doesn't get any later."

Bea's face crumpled. "Mommy," she choked out, "You bweaking my heawt."

"What?"

"You're breaking my heart, Mommy," she said, beginning to sob.

So now I'm a heartbreaker. Better get used to it, girls. It won't be the last time.

We saw God today and I mean that literally

"I just saw God," Beatrix declared calmly. I looked around the shelves of budget books for a kid's Bible.

"You mean you saw him in a picture," I said.

"No. I saw him."

"You can't see God," I said. I was tired and feeling less imaginative than usual.

Bea smiled. "Yes, you can." She wandered toward the poetry section and pointed. "There he is!"

A man with a white beard and a button-down shirt stared at the spines of books.

"That man there?" I whispered. "That's not God."

She nodded her head and crossed her arms. I'd just read her Aladdin, King of Thieves, most awful of Disney books. I was ready to browse a little myself and go. Martin was engrossed in the poetry section and I'd replaced several pink Christmas books and sat on a tiny chair and sang nursery rhymes as Bea plunked on an electric piano. The books were of middling quality but they were cheap. And God was apparently interested in a deal, because he was there.

"It is God," Bea insisted.

"Let's go ask him," I said, pulling her over to the bearded man. I thought it was odd that Bea had picked out a white bearded man, the classic image of God from Michelangelo to the 1950's, especially because we have never presented her with any like images, preferring to leave the physical God qualities up to her. It's hard enough to explain "spirit" to an adult, let alone a three-year old who demands, "Well, where? I can't see!"

But she had found God now, in the stacks of Half Price Books.

"Sir?" I asked. "Excuse me, sir?" I stepped closer. "Sir!"

He looked up. "Yes."

"Sorry, sir, my daughter would like to know if you are God."

He smiled. Mildly. I was surprised--I thought he'd put his head back and roar with laughter. I would, if someone asked me if I were God. He acted as if he got this question all the time. Bea was just one more in a long line of kids who thought he might be God.

"No," he said. "I'm just an engineer. And I forgot my flip-up tie today."

What's a flip-up tie?

He went back to browsing.

On the way home, as I told Martin about the encounter, Martin said, "If you asked God, would God answer you directly?"

"Maybe not. The man said he forgot his flip-up tie."

"That's probably just what God would say," Martin said, flicking on cruise control. We had thirty minutes to get back for Elspeth's school party.

"He did say he was an engineer," I said. "I guess that squares."

As for Bea, her faith remains unshaken. When I put her down for a nap, she pointed to a picture of a man in a yellow robe that hangs on the wall of her room. "That's God," she says. "And he has a beard."

Which may explain why Merry, who easily feels guilty, was always terrified of men with beards.

On the other hand, Bea has never singled out a bearded man and called him God before, and we see plenty of beards in our parts. If God did make an unexpected appearance at a discount bookstore, I missed the biggest chance of my life. I would have asked him some questions and I would have waited while he answered, even if his answers were as weird as the flip-up tie. And if you've read the Bible, the chances are pretty good that the answers would have been full of bizarre. Still. . . .

My column this week seems to have stirred the pot a bit. Read it by clicking on the geranium at right. What do you all think about the gas boom in our part of Pennsylvania?