Things I didn't know I love

Things I didn’t know I love--- prompt for Midtown Writer's group July 7th, 2007

I didn’t know I love air conditioning until I started having hot flashes. I love cool breezes in the middle of the night instead of huddling under a pile of blankets. My room in the basement is my cave of dreams. I incubate secrets into poems and my thrashing about with God becomes a prayer. It is cool and dark—all that I never wanted when I was light and bright and always chilled to the bone every winter.

Or is it the testosterone they say I gain by losing estrogen?

I didn’t know I love to be alone after a lifetime of collecting groups together—and this is not to say I don’t love company. I didn’t know the clarion call of my own soul and my own thoughts would be able to keep me entertained sufficiently to last through the coming sunset years. I always leaped up to make a phone call in the middle of my reveries. I still yearn for the most intimate of human connections—but I also cherish each moment of deepening silence when I let myself go there. Through flood watch and hurricane, through death and the crematorium’s smoky plumes, through celebration of a published poem, a sold painting, a child’s first step, an exchange of vows in an afternoon dappled lawn, yes, I need you there, my family, my tribe, my audience, my beloved, wearing the face of the Divine for me. But then what delight to let you go away so I can have me all to myself.

For this reason, I had to leave every place I fell in love with. For this reason I don’t know where I will end up being able to stay.