Feeling a little bit romantic, in the literary sense, here on Cape Cod on what is quite likely to be the last time we come here as a full family. My oldest heads to college - at least for a little while - in three weeks, and if my history is any guide, we're out of the family vacation business. After I went away to college, we had a few family trips for holidays, but we never again traveled as a unit on what you might call a vacation. And so there are feels.
I started to write a post about it, but my thoughts kept arranging themselves in a way that feels more conducive to a prose poem. I know fuck all about meter, and I'm not here to rhyme, but I hope you enjoy what might be the first original poem (non-Greasetruck/Yojo version) published here.
I walked by myself on the Brewster Flats
Which are singular enough to be capitalized
Receding tide pulling water in channels
Towards the open bay
My feet sank in the oozing pinkpurple sand
As I passed hermit crabs, fiddlers, gulls and
The occasional periwinkle, their trails tracing
A direct line from my childhood to my now
In front of me, the sweep of the Cape
From Orleans to Provincetown
The familiar bodybuilder's pose
Clear in the hot noontime air
In front of me, too, the moment
Three weeks from now when I drive
Home from Richmond
With one fewer passenger than before
Our house won't be seem as lively,
Won't be as profanely silly after
We drop our little girl off at college
To start her life without us
She's going to find her people there
Just like I found mine
Hers will know more of the world around them
And they'll be hers forever, too
Dr. Seuss said 'Don't cry because it's over,
Smile because it happened'
I'm going to cry anyway, because I do that these days
Tears mean you're moved
And my little grown-up girl moves me every day
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