Mom Dream, from the Family Album

She was trying to hold something, gathering in … lips blue/ black, saying: “I'm all right.”

I remember her telling me, over the phone one time: “It's a baby rabbit, and he was having a picnic. He was chewing away and chewing away. I had six tomato plants, and now I only have two left.”

And when my father was lying on his deathbed, sitting beside him: “I'm holding your hand. Yeah. Here I am,” she said. She turned to look at us. “He's squeezing my hand.”

And myself, I remember talking a cop out of a ticket near the Grand Lake Theater, turning left across a double yellow line: "I just lost everything in a divorce,” I told him (absolute truth.) “Can you give me a break?"

If I was a bee in life, I went from color to color, attracted to nectar, producing sweetness and amber stickiness, working for my queen and the common good.

If I was a deer, I nuzzled young leaves and fallen plums among plump blackberries on a gentle slope in the hills.

If I was human, I harassed my neighbors. I harbored bile. I don't know why I did this. But God loved me anyway.