Jeannine Atkins

My daughters’ roommates went back home for a bit, so Em was feeling a bit freaked out coming home from work or class to an empty apartment. I’m visiting for a few days mostly to be someone there, but it’s been so much fun to have time with her. Having breakfast of a new-to-me kind of cereal, looking through a fridge and cupboard where other things were like those at home: the rice cakes, the rye crackers, the hummus, the brand of peanut butter. And on her bookshelves – Mom, there’s New Moon if you get bored – Tudor era novels, art history textbooks, and she pointed out books I wrote. I like the blue, saffron, and silver scarves dangling from the pole in her closet, the pictures all around – those with me when she was little, and the family dogs; more with friends, many taken here where she’s surrounded by so much possibility, so much what-will-come.

After she left for work, I throw in some laundry and begin what I’m calling my writing retreat here. I break to walk for coffee and the smells of flowers are stunningly sweet -- or is that sunscreen? Mmmm, a whiff of eucalyptus. And I get to work on nothing that takes place in either L.A. or western Mass, but send myself off to ancient Iraq. Become neither a mom making up a bed for her grown daughter, nor that grown daughter at work in a cubicle or stepping out for a view of the Hollywood Hills. For most of the day, when I’m not folding laundry, or buying coffee in a shop where everyone’s sandals are much more glittery than mine, I’m a sixteen year old girl near the Euphrates River, waiting for news from the moon.