November, So Far

I guess we're doing another poem?

An Offering

In early November there were sheets and towels and clothes, washed and folded and put away, then worn, and washed, and folded again. There were old friends and board games, parent teacher conferences and a ukulele. Books were read. Logs and candles were burned. Soup was consumed. There was a front porch offering, a prayer, a welcoming, a howling at the full moon. Then the pumpkins collapsed. Snow fell. Ice wrinkled the edges of puddles. Birds were scarce, but there were squirrels, busy brown bodies scalloping over the branches. Branches, increasingly bare. There were humidifiers, cleansed and filled. School projects and head colds and doctor’s appointments and music lessons. Small clouds of breath in the sharp morning air. Heavy coats. Warm hats. Photographs that tried to capture the beauty of impermanence. An infinity of instants that fell outside the frame. There was a gathering, then, of available pieces. An offering, a prayer, a welcoming, a release.

A softening.

A letting go.

How’s your November so far? What do you do with the billions of life bits that fall outside the frame? Some of mine become poems, some float around in my journal, and the rest pile up in the part of my brain that could be remembering the name of that thing, you know the one, that thing that does the thing? Sigh.