Each week I send out a post called Joy Comes in the Morning to my paid subscribers. They are usually an excerpt from my “Morning Pages” three hand written journal pages, a disciple many writers use to get them started. I am unsure where this came from today but I so enjoyed writing it, so I thought I’d make it available to all. I hope you will enjoy reading it.
To all my subscribers, you have helped me create this vision, I am so grateful. There will be some exciting news soon. To my paid subscribers, you are nearly my sole source of income right now. Thank you for believing in me.
Three times a week,
my husband drags out the hose
to connect to our OG sprinkler
to water the lawn.
There is a complex placement that only he knows
to make sure every corner of the L shaped lawn
is touched.
It is a luxury to have a green lawn in the middle of summer,
but one we both want after childhoods in the hood.
The water hypnotizes as it waves back and forth
and I know later, the grass will be soft enough to lay upon
or even to roll across if I wanted to.
My Grandpa Bravo was meticulous about his lawn.
It was an oasis down the dusty alley in East LA where we lived.
You could smell metallic heat off the broken-down cars parked in our potholed alley.
I walked barefoot from my apartment to his yard.
My feet were tough as cactus then,
nothing like the often pedicured soles I now have.
Gidget, the Pitbull might be out of her yard again.
Grown men whimpered and ran back to their apartment doors when they saw her.
I rolled my eyes and yelled at her to get back in her yard, locking the gate behind her.
Years later, I learned I was related to her owners.
I did not know then. No one ever said anything.
Most could not look over Grandpa’s white washed wall.
It was something out of another world, Ireland or Greece maybe,
not the alley behind Chet Holifield Park.
Open the gate to thick lush grass with a mighty oak planted right in the center.
My neighbor Marie and I played Barbies there for hours.
Nana’s rose bushes lined the edge of the yard and
Although they were Catholic, a fat happy golden Buddha sat in the corner,
a memento brought back from years in the service.
I would not know until years later
That this man who took such meticulous care of his ghetto yard
And of me, was a bookie.
And how when he died,
Men came with envelopes for my Nana.
That morning was the regularly scheduled day for fertilizer.
When the men lined up to pay their respects,
They smelled Grandpa’s favorite scent,
Shit.