…The contentious marriage between what I know and what I don’t know
reminds me of my forty-year vowed commitment to my husband.

We’ve raised children, buried our own parents, and kept a canister of dog ashes.
We’ve woken up on our separate sides of the shared bed and filled days 

being who we thought we should be to become who we expected
ourselves to grow into, all the while keeping tallies

and not mastering the math of complicated problem-solving
that takes a whole whiteboard of variables; multiplication,

division, greater-than and less-than signs; and other language of algebra.
Here it’s important to add that I suffer

from a chronic tendency to romanticize. The challenge I long
to decipher is my 3:00 a.m. darkness, worry, empty-

place playground for the what-ifs—a litany of what I can’t control.
I’ve been trying to define this space for sixty-five years, all the while

simply stylizing. In current common conversation about you, the younger
generation, my friends—my friends and I share anecdotes about how

our daughters believe someone else, some “influencer” (all that ilk
of self-appointed/self-anointed), someone the young women we raised listen to.

Whatever we know as mothers can’t possibly be true, or work,
or hold any validity. The proof being we don’t have millions of followers. 

Collecting followers is the credential for wisdom or beauty
or authority of any kind and, therefore, of truth.

We talk, sounding like our own mothers lamenting that nothing
is the same anymore, it’s not how it used to be, and it is something  

we haven’t seen before, so that it’s easy to feel untethered,
unanchored, floating far from what we used to know as land.

As I wrote this speech, I looked out my wall of windows and watched
boats flow to the sound and back to the docks where they’re moored,

to their homes. The empty places, saved for the vessels to still.
My nighttime angst is often over what I don’t or didn’t have but wanted.

Different decades, different expectations and hopes: A baby
gave way to healthy children, a shapely figure morphed to lose five pounds…

This list could be as mundane as a sprinkler system; the right color scheme
for drapes, carpet, and upholstery; the balanced ratio of vintage and brand new

to make a house a home; a garden that is mostly perennial peonies and roses 
splashed with lush purple petunias and other annuals. I’ve worked hard

at homemaking. I’ve devoted days and years to mothering. I’ve been
a wife through seven different presidents. I’m grandmother of three, soon four.

Yesterday, when the sky was orange, the sun was hidden behind thick air and ozone.
The earth darkened midday due to Canadian wildfires. Every text and conversation

used a phrase like apocalypse or end of the world or the Bible said it would be like this. 
Even the lady stocking the condiment aisle at Stop & Shop said, “God’s telling us

we better get it right.” Later, at a nail salon, I had to wonder, Is this how I’m going out? 
My last moments of air having a Revlon red gloss painted over my old and thick

toenails. My metatarsals have reshaped themselves with age, like teeth
that need braces. The years show in my skin and ache through my bones.

I am this older woman who watches out windows, one who hadn’t imagined
being this version of herself when she was a younger woman still in lockstep

with the magazine ad photos. I listen to podcast reports of NASA discussing skies
full of UFOs, which have been renamed UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena). 

And are they coming to destroy us? Or have earthlings done so much
to ourselves and our planet that they are coming to save us? And talk to me, please,  

about them because all of my not understanding of myself is only outweighed
by my vast and infinite lack of understanding the other.