If you had told me I’d be writing poetry in a movie-set house

on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina,

on a grey rainy day in the middle of the week,

– as part of my job –

I might have believed it,

depending on when you’d told me.

 

The me who drank café crèmes in French cafés,

camped for the afternoon sipping

and pouring words into journals too myopic and lovesick to read now,

that me would have believed it.  No hesitation.

Of course, I’ll be a writer one day.  The set sounds perfect.

 

Twentysomething me, writer of the Bermuda short story

I showed every friend I had because, well, I was proud of it

and because I didn’t know what else to do with it,

she would have sheepishly asked, What kind of poetry?

 

Heartbroken me, would have sniffed, nodded,

looked up with red-rimmed eyes, knowingly.

What’s his name? 

 

Newly-minted seminarian me, the lonely one

still uncertain of her call after three years and a degree

who cried when the priest rubbed ashes on her forehead one Wednesday,

would have wanted to know What happened to ministry?

 

The oldest me

girl in a lavender bedroom

following the Ingalls family out west for the first time

would have – if you could have gotten her to look up from the book –

smiled

the unabashed smile of delight.