Wheat Gum

Cupping my hands weathered by motherhood,

years of hospital latex free gloves, play dough, dog leashes, 

the permaculture of life, the cracks, callouses, blood lines, 

speckles of memory live now like farm dust under my fingernails

I can still feel the tickle of the silty grain pile placed by my dad in my seven-year-old palms.

“Make some wheat gum” my father offers to my insatiable curiosity, 

“chew slowly. only swallowing your saliva.

let your tongue & cheeks knead the wheat. make the dough patiently.

only then you’ll have wheat gum”

My annual summer pilgrimage to our family’s wheat farm for harvest

plucked me off the pavement of the city as a child

into the unyielding sun of Nebraska’s long dusty roads, into golden seas far away from the familiar gray waters of Puget Sound

Grain!

Grain as far as my eyes could just see over the swaying stalks where bronze meets indigo 

“How far does the wheat grow daddy?” 

“As far as to feed the city of Seattle bread for the whole year”

“That’s so much bread daddy”

“Yes so much from such tiny grains, specks of wheat”

My father, a quantum physicist by fall, winter, spring university quarters

And a wheat farmer by summer semester 

studied miracles year round—

Making something from nothing 

I feel this miracle here in studying my empty worn hands, grandmother palm lines now,

ALL these memories still held in the nothing,

holding everything, feeding everything with love

April 9. In honor of what would be my late father’s 90th birthday.