I don’t know exactly when I began flinching at the sight of an American flag. I know it’s been since last November’s election, as I’ve watched civil rights crushed and truth trampled and our beloved national landmarks turned into private assets. I know these wrongs have dealt me an internal seismic shift, leaving me off balance, angsty, scared. And I know that for some time now, when I glimpse a flag, I automatically assume it belongs to a family or business group of Trump supporters, and I check to see if there’s a billboard close by, blaring “Lock Her Up!”…

Dogwoods are blooming among the cedars and alders and cottonwoods across our river. Rhodys sport clusters big as cabbages. Buds on our rosebushes are fat, about to pop. They’re doing their June thing, the one I celebrated in seventh grade Choral Music class. They’re bustin’ out all over.

We twelve years olds were bustin’ out ourselves, budding breasts, hair sprouting in new places, voices that cracked– June is bustin out all over! All over the meadow and the hill! School bored me, but bustin’ out some songs was all fine.

It was fine with me too, that year, to “join the church”, as expected before turning thirteen in our Southern Baptist congregation. The choir crooned Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling, their voices as tender and soft as the beige mouton jacket I wore as I slipped from my pew and walked, anxious but determined, down to the aisle to the preacher who clasped my hands and said, “Welcome, Welcome.”

My baptism was scheduled for Wednesday night two weeks later.

On the wall in the coffee room at the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, WA, hangs a three by three foot display in a simple black frame filled with squares, each square representing two letters of the alphabet. It’s titled “Fictional Character Alphabet Chart—Egads!” When S intersects with F, the character in the square is Scout Finch from “To Kill a Mockingbird”. When J meets E, we have Jane Eyre. Since there are 676 squares, many characters are obscure. The T and L square, for instance, is filled by Taduz Lemke, a gypsy in Stephen King’s “Thinner”. It is a massive project and impresses me to no end.

People who frequent the hotel know that Goody, the owner, made the chart. Goody is a character herself, who lives in Portland where she also owns the Rimsky Korsakoffee Shop. She named The Sylvia Beach for an ex-pat who ran a bookstore in Paris in the early nineteen hundreds.

“A poem prompt a day,” Two Sylvias Press advertised for April, National Poetry Month. “Only fourteen dollars.”

I’ll do anything within reason these days to fill my psyche with creativity rather than terror. And if I can’t read music but I sing, I should, I figured, be able to write poetry, though I don’t know how.

I bit. I bought. Every morning since, I’ve opened my prompt and slapped out some scraggly ass lines, figuring if I get a couple of poems worth fiddling with or fixing, I’ll get my money and, more importantly, my time’s worth.

I had my first private voice lesson yesterday. I stood beside the piano as my teacher, Annmarie, an exuberant blonde, played a scale, my feet placed apart as instructed, shoulders back, chest open, chin up, strengthening my diaphragm and singing Italian syllables from my head. When we finished the Mi Me Ma Mo Mu’s, I sang, five times, “Apes Ate All Eight Apples”, to improve the way I sing my “A’s.”

“Your voice is really pretty,” Annmarie said. “Great pitch. Great tone too.” Annmarie loves southern accents and thinks I’m a hoot. I don’t understand why, but no matter. We already like working together.

I’ve wanted to sing in a gospel choir since ’75 when I saw the movie “Nashville”, featuring Lily Tomlin as a tambourine-wielding white woman belting out spirituals with a Black choir.

Yesterday morning, at our newfound Methodist Church, Ed and I sang “Let There Be Peace on Earth”, the music and my heart filled with longing. At home, over tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, I picked up the book of prayers that lives on our kitchen table. “A Grateful Heart—Daily Blessings for the Evening Meal from Buddha to The Beatles”, though we often read from it before other meals too. I opened it to a passage from The Vedas, the oldest Hindu scripture. “The supreme Lord is Shanti,” I read. We smiled. “Shanti” means “peace”.

“It’s all the same stuff,” Ed said, and we smiled some more, remembering the first night we got together, sitting on the floor of his bachelor apartment in Jackson, Mississippi, listening to the Amazing Rhythm Aces, downing Coors beer, talking up a passionate storm. Neither of us was in great emotional shape, but we trusted each other with our stories and spiritual struggles.

My jaw is clenched. When I awoke at three o’clock this morning, my teeth and gums throbbed. My shoulders are sore from tensing them. There’s a place in my chest that’s heavy as lead.

We feel emotions in our bodies.

I said this countless times to my psychotherapy clients. “Pay attention to where you feel your anger and your fear. In your stomach? Your chest? Your throat? If you feel it, you can pay attention to it. If you pay attention to it, you can manage it.”

Last night, like every December for thirty years, Ed called me “Christmas Carol”. I was struck by how sweet he sounded, and how his eyes still do this twinkly Santa thing. He calls me Christmas Carol because he’s watched me, over and over, often against my will, fall slap dab in love with Christmas.

I sense and feel Christmas, rather than think about it. I soak in it. Whatever’s going on these few weeks in the year’s last month, it feels poignant and rich, and, though I mourn the passage of time, I’m grateful for the season and its undercurrent of excited anticipation.

But this year has been ultra-dark, and so has my heart. We see our family every other Christmas, so it’s just Ed and me this year, drenched in distress about where our country is headed, short tempered, short on patience. Well, okay, I’m the one short on patience.

When I learned of the “Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote” blog site, where writers share pieces about people they’re honoring by not voting for the Donald, I knew immediately whom I’d honor.

I am aware that a white woman writing about “the black woman who raised me” raises the eyebrows of those who find these portrayals condescending, idealizing, and presumptive. I’m also aware that, as a child in the fifties in the racially segregated, white-dominated South, the black woman who raised me was my only up-close encounter with a member of a “race” deemed by the adults around me as so much lower than mine, she might as well have been another species. Without this woman, I don’t know how I would have learned that these adults were dangerously wrong.

Time has always made me crazy. There’s never enough. I schedule my daily activities because time’s a wasting, and then I go hard, till I collapse. I get impatient when people don’t show on time, when my order takes too long, when I can’t click off the items on my lists.

Since I’ve retired, I have more free time, but I’m also increasingly aware that my time on earth is getting shorter, and that I’m wasting it. And I see how much I waste time by thinking about wasting it. This ever-present dilemma makes me crazy in an older way.