The mailman always smiles, waves, gives me my mail without using the box if I am out. Last year we stopped over the wall and spoke for awhile about the difficulty of his daughter not getting to go back to school yet, and the lingering weight of balancing life this way.
The checkout gal gave me a long speech about her mother and things she was making while I self-checked my groceries, smiling.
The car as Q and I walked, stopping and waving us on, simply, patiently watching with what looked like a gleam in their eye.
D arriving for a second day, gladness her mainstay despite a positive testing.
Flowers delivered, the fellow over the gate rapt with no hurry speak and awe the castle and what it beheld, keeping me talking about the seven years growing it, loving it, laboring it.
Caffeine and renewed recognition my vocal fuel.
The preacher, last time so long ago I went, stood above, as if necessary to see but really you know it was his own ego standing so tall
jabbering into his tiny microphone projecting wrath couched as a call that commands complicitness.
Do you see the difference?
In the world, oh yes that world, there is church without coercion.
Can’t you see?
This is what the God I believe in created and said was good.