Morning in Normandy
A post is long overdue! It’s a full season. I’ve been attending to my family, writing more poetry than prose, and working on a few design projects for myself and friends. I hope to keep up the regular posts in the coming months with a poem here and there to keep it fresh, and thank you, as always, for being here!
My husband and I celebrated eight years of marriage yesterday, and it’s funny that, although eight years seems like a lot of time to us now, I hope, one day, we’ll see it as hardly any time at all. We are so much changed and also still very much ourselves—for better or worse. We’re grateful and also humbled, aware that love is much deeper than we anticipated, and always beginning again, which is the great task of life.
In lieu of a piece on interiors, here is a poem I wrote a few months ago, remembering our trip to France before our first baby was born. Our honeymoon had been simple and close by because we wanted it to be, but when we found we were expecting, we decided to make a tour of Paris, Brittany, and Normandy together. We walked everywhere in Paris because I had an inexplicably irrational hesitation about the Metro, read poetry as we drove through the green April countryside, ate croissants and baguettes like it was our job, and promised to come back often.
Our favorite spot was a chateau where we stayed near St. Mere Iglese, whose turret dates back to the 600s. The innkeepers were remarkably kind and generous and happy for us, their last name “Poisson,” they laughed— “like the fish!”. I often wonder if, were we to return in the spring, we would find that place still the same, lush with tree and grass life, wet and gray in the morning, with an aging couple smiling from the stone steps. But we think of it and of them often, and so, in the way that memory holds time steady, it is.
Morning in Normandy
We nudge the shutters open
into a world of gray,
the day not yet day, still tender
with forms and shadows unfamiliar to us.
And everywhere in misty thickness
above the smudged hills,
birds are singing morning songs—
hundreds of hidden voices giving voice to the air.
This Norman morning marks
the beginning of beginnings
of our love. I am with child, and I feel myself a child,
but the birdsong is dancing everywhere.
I cannot but help recall
other mornings, other darknesses,
the same question being always asked;
We have always been beginning.