We have all been in a place in our lives when we recognize the inevitable truth: It is time to move on.

Whether it's a job that's no longer fulfilling, a partner who's no longer willing, or any kind of situation that leaves you wanting, it's not something that is feeding your soul.  Which means, as gut wrenching as it feels, that it's time to move on.

When the spouse spends one more night on the couch, the co-worker gets one more promotion that you should have been given, the Bumble date is late one more night, it's time to move on.

When you've had one too many drinks that compromise your safety, when your faith in an establishment is shaken again, when your dear friend "missed" your call one call too many, it's time to move on.

When your nascent love is rejected, when your hope in a new boss is unfounded, when the leader of your faith congregation is uncertain, it's time to move on.

Sometimes, it's exactly when your heart is breaking and your hope is failing and your mind is challenged and your soul is fighting to stay strong that you realize - it's not only time to move on, but moving on is the only option.

Moving on can mean healing, and new opportunities, and renewed hope. But it's never easy.

And then Spring arrives. 

Possibilities arrive in this fecund season, promising hope, and life, and - dare we say - love. We hold our faces to the sun, and wait for the growth, for the flowering, for the movement of life, and the dewy grass of each new day.

I am requiring my 10th graders to write poetry, so I whipped this up while they worked.

Pens, pencils, colors of ink
   tops of heads pretending to think
Doodling, drawing, occasional jeer
Hoping that I don't come near
   and find the AirPods in their ears.

Sneaking, munching, dropping crumbs
   - yes, they believe I'm just that dumb
Talking, laughing, way off task
   Is "learning" really too much to ask?

Complaining, whining, acting brave
   worried their grade's too low to save
Trying, risking, making new starts - 
   this is why they hold a special place in my heart.

In 2001, Vladimir Putin confessed to being a huge fan of the "La Femme Nikita" star, whose career began as a model in Australia and Europe. Although her career has not been illustrious, Peta Wilson was the first woman I experienced in a TV show who played a character that broke some of the molds of "badass women." Also, she often wore dark lipstick, and who didn't love that fad?

“I made you a new housecoat, momma.” Eve holds out the garment.

“You may sew better than you clean my kitchen, but I don’t need a new housecoat.”

“You know Pastor Bob is visiting this morning.” Eve has rehearsed this part.  “Your purple housecoat is in the laundry.”

Edith fingers the white lace running down the front zipper, the black bows stitched at the neck.  Eve has counted on her mother’s lifelong weakness for bows.  She relents, and allows herself to be dressed.  While Eve styles the older woman’s stiff white curls, Edith prattles about election results.

“A Negro in office.  We’re a country of heathens.”

“Pastor Bob would say the Lord works in mysterious ways,” Eve murmurs boldly.

“Don’t be foolish, girl.  Saint Paul says, ‘What communion hath light with darkness?’  Darkness, Saint Paul says.”

Blue veins pop out of the crepe-paper skin on Eve’s hands.  “People are people, momma, no matter their skin color.”

“None of that.  Thought I cured you of that when that King man got shot.”

“That was forty years ago.”

“Don’t I know it,” her mother snaps.  “And we’re still no better off than to get a Negro president.”

April 4, 1968.  Edith had made Eve scrub the kitchen floor with Eve's own toothbrush for wearing a black armband after Martin Luther King’s assassination.   A ribbon, actually; one of Eve’s few hair decorations. 

A black ribbon that, forty years later, silently ties together the white lace of her mother's new housecoat.
 
 

My favorite role played by Naomie Harris is as Eve Moneypenny in the Daniel- Craig-as-James Bond movies. This British actress graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1998 with a degree in social and political sciences. 

After high school, Hugh Jackman spent a year teaching Physical Education. He returned to study at the University of Technology, Sydney, graduating in 1991 with a BA in Communications. In his final year of university, he took a drama course to make up additional credits. ​​This led him to his future at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

Although I didn't realize this until 2018, I was predestined to love Hugh Jackman because I love the woman who became his wife. Deborra-Lee Furness played the mother of my childhood crush David in Disney's "Newsies." I wouldn't encounter Hugh Jackman until he played Wolverine, in the X-Men film series from 2000 to 2018, for which he holds the Guinness World Record for "longest career as a live-action Marvel superhero."

Sometimes

happiness
is
         being asked.

Properly,
           and sincerely.

I am
​    not 
        a commodity.

Aging the Miyazaki Way

 In the mirror she melts
like a Miyazaki documentary on aging
     a decaying orb
     an oil slick
the colors vivid as so many Copics
     as vast as an RGB table can make
the brilliance bigger than any one heart

but they only see her blobbiness
     shapelessness
they equate her curves
     to precise fitness calculations
     that she has not solved
they gaze at her through toothpick glasses
compare her soft gooeyness
     to metal muscles

Their gaze takes
her structure, her form - 
steals her shape even further
    until she is only color
that evaporates on the gossamer breath
     of their young judgment.