'Tell me something wondrous.'

'Tell me something wondrous, something to remind me of the spirit of Christmas.'  This was the request today from one of my dearest friends.

Christmas is less than four days away; our pace has slowed.  The office parties are over.  The shopping is mostly complete.  Meals are planned and in the staging process.  The kids are out of school and folks are traveling to be with friends and family.

On the banks of the Maquoketa River, the winter solstice dawned with a glassine coat of ice on the bare tree limbs; everything a shade of white and gray, beautiful.  I passed a farm, surprised by the brilliant yellow of a full corn crib.

The first day of winter and we await a snow storm.  In town, there was the expected scurry of shoppers on the last Saturday before Christmas, but there was more bustling as they prepared for several inches of snow and the guarantee of a white Christmas.  It was the talk of every shopkeeper, every customer, and no one seemed too bothered by it.

I have only to wrap a few gifts between now and Christmas.  I'm halfway through listening to my Christmas music collection.  Afternoons are filled with Bing Crosby, Elvis, Bette Midler, the Pink Martinis, Dixie, jazz and folk Christmas carols.  I save 'O Holy Night' and Mahalia Jackson's 'Silent Night' for Christmas Eve; the moment I feel the true spirit of Christmas and as close to God as I can get.

I will think of all my friends, scattered the world over, it seems.  I will think of Jeff and remember our Christmases together.  I will remember my friend, Christopher, who passed away this year, and those glorious, fun, strawberry-filled Christmas Eves we spent in the warmth of our closest friends.

The older I get, the more astounded I am by the passage of time; by things I have collected and the memories attached to them.  I am mystified by the blessings I've been given.  I have been softened by  heartaches.

The perfectly not-so-perfect path our lives seem to take.

Those first snowflakes tonight, the vallens (an old word for snowfall), will arrive quietly, muffling an already silent river valley.  I will stand at the window, in the glow of my Christmas tree, and breathe deeply.  And wonder.

Merry Christmas.

Thirty days: 30 paintings, 30 poems

In November 2011, six months after Jeff died and still consumed with grief, I decided to pour that energy into a 30-day exercise of writing a poem each day.

The poet, David Lehman, wrote a poem every day for a year and collected some of those poems in his book, The Daily Mirror.  In the introduction, he noted how it was 'hit or miss', some poems falling flat and some days were complete misses. I'd read those poems a few years ago and found the concept intriguing.

I'm not a prolific poet, I tend to wait for inspiration; the sudden poetic phrase or line.  It doesn't happen often. By that November, I'd written a dozen  poems about Jeff, his death, my grief, increasing my poetic batting average and  I figured there might be another 30 poems wallowing inside me.

It took a couple of nights to realize I would not be receiving divine inspiration every day.  I don't know that I ever did.  I learned to find inspiration; facing the blank page and grabbing an idea out of the air.

I met that first challenge completing 30 poems in 30 days.  Two poems were almost really good.  Another four had potential.  Ten others worth salvaging and the rest would be filed away.  Not a bad effort for a poet.

The following November, I took the challenge again.  I had moved to my native Iowa and it was my first winter in nearly 30 years.  I was enamored of the quiet, the bitter cold, the life and death of seasons, and many of those poems are inspired by Iowa's beautiful but unforgiving winter landscape.

As a seasoned poem-a-day poet, I knew what to expect.  I didn't fret nights when I had nothing.  I would open my notebook, rummage around in my head and start writing.  I had about the same results as the previous year.

I'd written 60 poems in two years (not counting any written the other months) and of those 60 poems, four have been published.  I'm a poet, not a mathematician, but it seems like a good average.

One of those published poems, 'In A Hopper Painting', became the inspiration for this year's November ekphrastic exercise in poetic masochism.  I love the regional realistm of Edward Hopper and in his six decades as an artist, he left an extensive body of work.  I would write 30 poems, each inspired by his paintings.

It has been the most difficult of the challenges.  I read essays on his works.  I spent hours thumbing through books of his collected works.  I read his weighty biography.  I discovered  little-known works; works not typical of Hopper.  His paintings offered an unfinished narrative, a poetic leap. I avoided more linear interpretations and sought out an emotional landing.  Some paintings veered toward a more personal experience.

'Nighthawks' is not my favorite Hopper painting, but as the month closes, I realize it is the most fitting finish to this exercise.

Tonight, in the quiet dark, I'll sit down, open my notebook, stare at the lonely creatures gathered at the counter and imagine how it all will end.

How dogs, diners and death brought me back to life.

It's three years since my partner, Jeff, died. The grief was consuming, breathtaking; sometimes beautiful, sometimes hellish. “We all ask the same question,” the poet, Dorianne Laux said to me shortly after Jeff died. “Who am I in the face of death? For you, the answer is a simple one: I'm a writer.”

And so I wrote. Poems filled with my grief, my anger, my confusion. My wonder.

A year later, I loaded my belongings and my dog, Jack, and returned to Iowa where I grew up. I moved into my father's lake home in the tiny village of Delhi in Delaware County.

I found a job as a short-order cook in a small diner, a place where farmers gather in the early morning to gab over coffee and eggs.  "We're like a family here," the owner's wife told me the first day.  It was a far-cry from retail manager, but I found the artistry in working the grill.  And I found a family.

I'd only been in Iowa three months when I met Joey, a fat ball of black fur and the saddest puppy eyes. He was leashed with a bit of twine and two young girls were desperately trying to find homes for him and his three sisters.

I wrote more poems that fall and winter; poems about Iowa, about the farms and the churches, about the quiet. I still grieved for Jeff, but there was a shift, a turning, a discovery that I was going on and surprisingly, it was okay.

My second winter is coming. Joey is a big, lovable teddy bear of a dog, and he and Jack make an odd pair. The three of us crawl into bed at night, the best threesome I've ever had. 

And recently, I noticed, grief slipped into memory.

 In theory, you let go.