This beautiful life is yours
The first thing I smell after being stuffed up for weeks is freshly mowed grass.
I lower my window for a half a second and it slips in as I’m driving home
from a coffee shop where I couldn’t even smell the coffee, so how is this possible?
A smell, hand delivered on a breeze, which sounds hokey and sentimental, except
that’s exactly how it happened. I guess just because something is sentimental
doesn’t mean it isn’t. On that breeze came entire summers of childhood, easy days
of suburban quarter acres and green Schwinn bikes that my best friend Melanie,
who lived right across the street, and I both had. Every day and every day, we’d find
another way to grow up together. Her family moved to Kentucky when we were 13,
and the day she left I chased her car down Yale Lane waving and sobbing, and then
came home to a mailbox stuffed with cards and stickers from her. What a brilliance
of love that first friendship is. The first blooming of the heart, first real connection
with someone not in the family, first knowing you’re not alone. Now all I crave is
a street no one else is driving on, that feels as easy as those summers when my bike
took me everywhere and everywhere meant the same tiny creek down the block and
to the right, past a fence until there it was, a bit of nature suburbia couldn’t be
bothered with. Trees and tadpoles, sound of water bouldering over tiny rocks.
If you mattered in my life, I brought you to this creek and we would talk about
not fitting into these matching rectangles of homeownership our parents worked
so hard for. The safety of split-level houses with two-car garages and separate
laundry rooms. What more could we want? But I did want more. Or maybe less.
I wanted that creek. And a friend to bring to the creek. And a bike to get me there.
Poet of page and stage, Illinois Arts Council recipient, four-time Ragdale fellow, and Emmy nominee for voice-over and on-screen narration of the PBS documentary From Schoolboy to Showgirl, cin salach has collaborated with musicians, video artists, and most recently chefs and scientists, for over 30 years. She was honored to be the inaugural Poet Laureate of Covenant Farm in Sawyer, Michigan. Her two books of poetry, Looking for a Soft Place to Land and When I am Yes are housed there in the Porch Swing Poetry Box.
cin leads circles of women writers in a monthly workshop called Splitting the World Open, and also creates monthly poetry experiences for humans with dementia called Remembering Ourselves which celebrates the power of living in the present moment—something people with dementia do better than anyone.
