The Jobes
—Poetry and Family Photos by James Lee Jobe, Davis, CA
We plant a garden every spring, my wife and I, our hands in the soil. My hands are large, hers are smaller, but together we do the work as we must. This life comes as it does, every new day opens like a page in a book that is at times beautiful and at times difficult. The garden that we grow together is a chapter in this book, a chapter that I love to read and re-read, time and again.
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Sunrise, first coffee. A news reporter announces the COVID-19 deaths of the day before. Thousands. My wife is still asleep and I take a moment just to watch her.
May her pain be healed. May she always know love, and always have love in her life. May her heart continue to grow as it has always grown, steadily across these long years. May each new day be her blessing and each new night bring her peace and rest. A prayer for my wife.
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It takes some time to learn to live with death. It doesn’t happen overnight. Death can be a horrible neighbor, a demanding housemate. Death moves into your house and never leaves again. Three years have passed since my son left this life and death moved in with us. To stay. This house is still a home, true, but it seems a little darker now, even though I can still hear the echo of my son’s huge laugh.
I grieve alone before dawn, when my valley is still quietly resting beneath the blanket of darkness. I stare into the last fold of night until the face of my late son becomes clear, and then I listen until I can hear his voice again, And then I allow myself to break down, to fall apart. For a long time I counted the days since his death. Now I count the years.
Today’s LittleNip:
Let us be mindful of that which grows and blooms, bringing life and beauty to the earth. And let us give thanks.
—James Lee Jobe
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Our thanks to James Lee Jobe for his loving poetry this morning. He writes, “A lot of personal stuff this week, so the photos are personal, too. I took Andrei Codrescu's poetry class in 1980. The week I started the class, I got a rejection letter saying that they didn't want ‘I’ poems. I told Andrei, and he sneered this reply in his thick Romanian accent, ‘They are not paying attention. ALL poems are 'I' poems.”
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—Medusa
—Public Domain Photo
Courtesy of Joseph Nolan, Stockton, CA
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