I only need to organize it

The in-box is never empty

She is in my dreams again, as you know, whipping up healthy meals and storyboarding our book. Life and what we’ve already written keep getting in my way of this next assignment.

Can’t you cut me a little slack now? It’s all there; I need only to organize it.

Laura J. Morefield and Daniel Morefield

It took more than a year for Dan to clear up what you had yet to organize. The week before you died you put bunches of trip photos into a plastic tub so you could make a book out of them – a photo journal of sorts.

How I wish I could paste all our days into a book, savor each moment, each laugh and caress, the bells in Gubbio, watching you sleep at night, breathing your breath.

Laura, I feel like I’m running out of steam now, and just now, when I’m running out of steam, life keeps coming on – requests for me, my brains, my words.

Write Out Loud is reading “Dancing Out of Time” October 8, your birthday, and I won’t even be there, but on a plane returning from my 60th high school reunion in Chicago.

A USC grad student is singing Winter Roses on her American Composers-themed recital December 2. I plan to be there. How I wish you could go, too.

All this transpires amid production meetings in regard to our theatre piece, The Warriors’ Duet. The director/producer asked me in our recent meeting why I wrote Warriors and what purpose I hoped it would fulfill.

Laura J. Morefield and Mom
heading for St. Petersburd and the White Nights
2008

I wrote it for us – so that we could be together again, for the first time on a stage; so people could hear your faith-filled celebrations of life and love and adoration; so they could know you and your diction of courage; so they could know it is possible to go on despite the ache that never goes away.

What I hope it does is to imbue them with courage for their own battles; allow them to mourn the loss of those they loved; and most of all to allow them to know you as I did – obstinate, intelligent, warm, scornful (were you ever that?), caring and most of all funny.

Our relationship was not always easy, but it was always worth fighting for; we never stopped admiring one another. So here I am, challenged by all these assignments and recognitions, and with no you to urge me on.

Miss Mommy, you know you can do it.

Thelma, Chuck and Charlene Stube
1952

I've had a few requests for "Motherwit," which I wrote at midlife regarding my own mother, Thelma Marie Stube.

So here it is:

Motherwit

If I could bring her back,

Now that I've matured;

If we could really talk...

Perhaps I'd be reassured

her disapproval was imagined;

the pattern she had in mind

was not perfection.

I do not discard

Nor do I hate

The what-I've-beens.

They are part of me.

Instead I begin

Reassembling

Fragments I found

After I forgave.