Twelve Years (and, of course, counting…)

Rae Spencer

I don’t mark the anniversary of Mother’s car accident every year. In years where the date (today) passes without my noticing how it is today, I congratulate myself. This is not one of those years. This year I’ve noticed. All week.

I’ve noticed, but I can’t say that I’ve wallowed. This feels like an improvement over the wallowing years, though perhaps a step back from the not-noticing years. Maybe each of these years are actually equal, on my journey. Wallowing, noticing, not-noticing, maybe these things say more about growth and time than I’m capable of understanding.

And perhaps these noticings and not-noticings say something about how my mind works, about how it was working (or not working) in those individual years. Perhaps it’s not a complete non sequitur to point out that bee’s toes are much more exciting and interesting than bee’s knees, though the knees tend to get all the memes.

Macro photograph of a bee’s furry leg as it grasps a bright yellow cosmos petal while it is perched to sip nectar. The bee’s foot seems to be made up of three delicate hooked toes, each curled around the edge of the petal, while the bee’s knees appear to be simple hinge joints.

All of these wonderings and maunderings feel somewhat unproductive, but they are sometimes where poems start. So I’m letting myself wonder and maunder.

Macro photograph of a bee collecting pollen and nectar from the tiny yellow flowers of fennel. The black-and-yellow bee has yellow pollen dusting the hairs on its legs, head, and thorax. There’s even a scatter of pollen across the front edge of its wings. Its eyes are large and vaguely reflect the sky and sun, its antennae are long and segmented, and its delicate hooked toes are visible. Its knees are, relatively speaking, unremarkable.

While I’m waiting to see if a poem arrives, it seemed reasonable to update an old entry from April 2012, Finding What I Wasn’t Looking For. (In the post, I talked about Mother’s affinity for four-leafed clovers.) Except somehow, in updating the post (to add photo captions, mostly), I managed to change the post’s date to today. Now I can’t change it back.

Perhaps this, too, says something about how my mind works.

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