More on: Molly McCully Brown

if the kitchen reminds of us of anything, it’s that a new day always follows the last one. And, in it, the sun will rise. And then someone will need to make breakfast: fry an egg, put the coffee on, wash and dry the dishes left to soak. If we’re lucky, the kitchen is a place we go to keep ourselves alive. If we’re luckier still, it offers an occasion to be tender: with ourselves, with someone else, with the accumulating fabric of our days. There’s weight, and grace, in the way hours stack together. The work they offer us. The waiting they demand.

A rip is a wound—and also a place where brightness filters in. But the potential for light doesn’t mean the tearing doesn’t hurt.

I think about how my grandmother greeted death. She was ready. What a blessing.

I don’t know if it’s getting older, but as I and people around me experience more loss in our personal lives, I’ve been coming to a sense of the reality that life is shaped around loss—not despite it but because of it.

The world warms up, the prairifire crabapple trees begin to drop their blossoms in almost technicolor puddles on the sidewalks in my neighborhood and, as if in concert, the base of my neck gets heavy and sore.

I’m always looking around for omens.

Really, this is why I’ve always loved and needed poems: they sustain the contemplative hours of the early, unbreeched morning, whenever you come to them.