Are you traveling to see family this Labor Day weekend?  This is an opportunity to think about your family and your identity.  In the following poem, Angela C. Trudell Vasquez describes the town within which her family lived and describes her family within the town.   

“Identity”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/146927/identity-5b05c79b7b931

 

Take some time to read it.  After reading and enjoying the poem the first time, I went back and looked for a line that could inspire a response from me.  I chose

“according to the unspoken doctrine in our house of:

fast first eat later after communion,

we intruded with our Mexican music

bellowing out the open windows

the smell of bacon frying,

pancakes baking, coffee

and eggs scrambled to order”

 

What are the “unspoken doctrines” of your house?  Here is your invitation:

Begin with the line  “According to the unspoken doctrine in our house of:” and keep going.  What would that doctrine be? How does it influence what your family does and how it interacts with its community?

Here is the first ten minutes of drafting I did this morning, following this prompt.

According to the unspoken doctrine in my husband’s head of:

clean first, then be social,

we put worn-out socks on our hands and dust the wooden edges of the stairs,

unload the clean dishwasher, fill it with the ones from the sink,

fold the dry laundry, and start a new load from the plastic trash can laundry basket.

He cuts the September sunflowers toppled by last night’s thunderstorm

and places them towering over the kitchen counter.

There is also the kitchen floor to wipe, endlessly crumby and stained,

the chickens to feed, the fern on the front porch to water.

My body, too, is a chore to check off the list:

stretch, strain, pump up, and sedate.

In sleep we regain the will power to do it all again tomorrow,

this wheel of making.