The Child’s Gate

Writing has once again claimed most of my time. I love it, though my other loves—painting and photography—wait somewhat forlornly in the wings. There are only so many waking hours in a day, and domestic tasks quietly insist on their share.

After completing The Weight of Air, my travel memoir, (available by donation) another project has taken hold: an autobiography written in prose-poem form. Epic in length, it has already grown beyond 6,000 words and is not yet halfway finished. Most poems average fewer than 300 words, so this one stretches the form considerably.

The work begins with my father and mother—their early lives and eventual meeting in Chicago. Then come my own beginnings: the arrival of my four siblings, the rhythms of our household, my father’s work in social justice, the moves, the schools, the growing up—alongside my mother’s struggles and her efforts to find balance. Graduation follows, then leaving home, mental struggles, and the uncertain steps into adult life.

The writing has now reached the time when my first daughter, Naomi, was born. Soon afterward her mother and I divorced, and her mother had to be institutionalized. The story carries both tenderness and upheaval.

Here is a small section from that writing.

The Child

Strong vowels formed her name:
Naomi.

For a season
three shared one bed.
Her mother’s breast was never far.

Light gathered in her—
blonde hair,
green eyes.

No sooner had she found her steps
than the hand began to draw.

In her father's studio
page after page
flew from her grasp.

At first
only bright scribbles—
then houses, figures,
the sun and rainbows.

A small school stood nearby.
She entered the circle of others.

A few years passed quietly
before the first fracture.

Something within her mother
turned against itself.

Hunger answered,
then denied.
Food taken in,
then cast away.

Voices rose at night.
Rooms held what could not settle.

Then the word was spoken:

Divorce.

It did not rest easily in him.
Yet it was received
as a narrowing path
that might still lead forward.

Life itself would soon echo these early fractures. My own path would swing between light and shadow—moments of fulfillment set against darker passages. There were successes, but also low points, such as the mental breakdown that occurred a few years after graduating from university with a B.F.A., when I spent three days in a hospital.

Writing these memories means living them again. Yet the distance of time allows new insights to appear—quiet understandings that were invisible in the moment.

While completing a section describing Naomi’s early life, I came across a drawing she made when she was about six years old. It is so luminous it might have been made by an angel.

Through a trellised gate covered in flowers we see a young horse resting on a grassy knoll in the near distance. Around the horse’s neck is a red ribbon, the same red ribbon that winds through the flowers climbing the trellis. Behind the animal shines a bright sun, its red rays spreading outward, while a few soft white clouds drift across the sky.

The image suggests a threshold—a passage between the ordinary world and somewhere more protected, more essential. Yet the gate is not forbidding. It is a trellis covered in flowers, an invitation rather than a barrier.

Beyond it rests a young horse entirely at peace in its meadow. The red ribbon circles its neck and winds through the flowers, as if beauty itself has reached outward and gently claimed the creature.

Behind it all shines a bright sun, spreading warmth across the scene. Even the clouds drift without menace.

The drawing suggests that the child understood something wordlessly: that somewhere within her there existed a place no upheaval could reach—tended, flowering, quietly illuminated from within.

Perhaps children know this instinctively—that somewhere within them there is a meadow no storm can reach.

Read the award winning A Heart Traced In Sand, about Naomi. (By donation)