To Be a Moth

I'm sitting on my front porch, last glass of rose' on the chair beside me. My old Addie sits at my feet. Charlie on guard at the top of the step, Bella his sister, three feet behind him in the open doorway in a twin stance.

Cricket and cicada calls surround me on three sides—the crickets a never ending low pitched or is it actually high pitched continuum?, the cicada—is it a cicada or a tree frog? its calls break the continuum every four seconds—a natural symphony soon to be curtailed by the first frost—and to top it all off, Jim playing the piano behind me in the music/library room. So clear and strong—"What a Wonderful World", listening he comes fully back to me. I do not turn around as that would destroy my myth. Rather I think he is here with me, we are living our lives.

Like the soft scent of the finger-like cimicifuga—a plant known to ease pain—bittersweet. Such blessed romance from his fingertips to my now. I so miss his playing daily in our home. I now fill it with radio and other digital recordings, not the same, how I miss live music in my home. Still I am blessed to still have this facsimile.

And yet part of my mind travels alongside to a new love—yes, a new love. And another absence, three weeks away in a foreign land I have not yet traveled. Celebrating family.

It's all so complicated these loves not here.

I was so blessed by Jim and our love and then so cursed by his dying. Why love again this 68/16 year old brain of mine asks? The pain, so drowning, which has been so hard to swim up to this life causes such uncertainty. What is life? Why my life?

A feathered moth settles onto the searching fingers of the snake plant. It is settling in for the night to its temporary abundance. Yet these two, the plant and the moth, will face the upcoming hard frosts.

And so will I again. I am the one aware, they are not, and tears threaten to wet these pages again. Yes worth it. to love and be loved, worth it like the transient scent of the black cohosh—so many names for the indefinable.

Longing, reaching....both for the great love that was fulfilled and for that which is uncertain. Simply I wish to bury myself like the moth in Life's beauty.

(Sometimes we must wait for to hear the music once again)