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Show Moon - 233 but with no sense of what, exactly, I miss or what I might hope for with them. I wonder what brother-sister love is supposed to be like. Is there a painting called "Elder sister and Brother," or a poem, "Ode to my Young Brothers?" So little to go on! The love aches like something unrequited, but it has no form and thus no means of expression. There's no Word to be made flesh. I've doubled back from Evanston to be here, as if I'm finishing a circle. There's a little more of me on this go-round because I have a real father to carry inside me now and who knows what else. Gloria says this cottage is where my family's home is, but it looks strange to me, like I'm seeing it for the first time. The weathered wood needs staining. The porch railing is missing some rungs. This cottage needs more love than it's likely to get, but it would be a wonderful subject for painting in the manner of worn-down rustic realism. I've always thought of art as the purest sort of love, but I wonder if it isn't actually a form of neglect, a deflection of head-on mending and healing. I am thinking that our little homilies have meanings we overlook. Take, "There's no place like home." Take it literally, and what are you saying? You're saying, "Home isn't a place." Or take, "Make yourself at home," which suggests that home is something you do, not something that's there. Some people say the world isn't out there at all, that we've made up the whole thing, like Mary Baker Eddy's Error. But I think if I ever find the right way to honor Father- Mother God, the world will shine out as real as the wings of seed on the maples, and home will be, finally, where my heart is. How to honor God? Around the time my mother died, America was exploding with Jesus. Mass baptisms appeared on the TV news showing people swarming into the ocean like a migration of seals, a red tide, schools of mackerel |