Emily Brisse

In the middle of April--all the leaves reaching up and out above the marsh, the ground covered with green shoots and blades, the air full of fresh breath, the sky blue with rain--our daughter was born. We named her Charlotte. And to us, she is sweeter than anything else that is clean and fragrant and hopeful this spring. With my first child, words came naturally, and fast. I felt a need to say all the things, to record somehow the way I was feeling, the way it all seemed, how particular were the moments I spent getting to know him, getting to know myself as a mother, getting to know the newly defined world. I reread those musings now, and they still feel exactly right. I can remember who I was when I wrote them. I can remember how that version of the world felt, as viscerally as I can touch and sense my own skin. But with this baby--there is less urgency. I'm not sure exactly why this is, as she will be my last child. I know she will never be eight pounds again, her days of bei...

Littlest One, It is snowing outside. Last week the grass was green, my begonias still vaunting their soft pink petals. And tonight, your brother asleep, the night a quiet dark, I watch the way the white changes everything over into something new. You do not know yet, the way things fall at different speeds. You do not know yet, the way a cup of hot tea can calm. You do not know yet, the feel of soil between your fingers. You do not know yet, the sound of singing. You do not know yet, the possibilities of a daydream. You do not know yet, the scent of wood smoke. You do not know yet, the pleasures of the body. You do not know yet, how humans can disappoint. You do not know yet, this snow softly falling, this apple on my tongue, how beautiful and fragile it all can seem. I have tried to guide your brother. “Look,” I tell him. “Look up, look low, look there, look under, smell that, touch this, listen to that crow that chickadee that owl. Breathe...

Yesterday, on our drive home, my son asked to stop at the local elementary school playground. It was a beautiful afternoon, and I was antsy from grading final essays inside all day, so I willingly brought us there. For the first few minutes, I followed him protectively as he circled through slides and ladders and bridges, dodging the older and sharper movements of the kids also there playing as a part of the after-school program. Eventually, though, I told Elliot I was going to rest on a bench nearby, and not thirty seconds later, I observed him introducing himself to an older boy sitting in the shade underneath the slide, playing with an assortment of small objects. "Hi," I heard my son say. "Can I play with you?" I couldn't overhear how the other one replied, and because of the age difference--I would learn later he was in second grade, easily four or five years older than my son--I felt myself again on guard, wondering if El would be able to read a social c...

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you. -- by David Wagoner To a year of being found. Happy 2016, all.

It is so quiet, I hear the second-hand on the kitchen clock ticking. There goes an airplane overhead, somewhere up there in the sky, a hundred people belted in, dozing, reading, shifting, catapulting through the night. It is 54'. It is autumn. This is always the season for me: the one where I seek out the still places in the day, listen for the silence. What I really want is to pull out my old sleeping bag, lay it down upon a hill, and climb in, stare up, watch how minutely and inevitably everything changes. I don't want to miss it. I know that I will. Suddenly all the leaves are on the ground. Tonight, just before dinner, I slipped on a fleece and some gloves and dug little holes around the garden. Yesterday a friend's mother snapped off the tops of a flowering sedum, gave them to me, and said, "Plant them, like this, upside down." So I did, tucking those starbursts of purple into bed the way I do my child: tenderly, patting tight the blanket, hopeful for...

One Tuesday afternoon, a month or so ago, I lay stretched out on my bed, my not-quite-two-year-old son cuddled between my arm and body, reading poetry aloud. " Before I was sixteen / I was fast / enough to fake / my shadow out," I read. "The instructor said, / Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you-- / Then, it will be true." "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--" I placed my lips against the feverish brow of my boy, my fingers running along the length of his arm, reading over the top of my worry. Reading because the sound had soothed him, had taken him away from the limbs of his discomfort. Reading. [... And speaking of reading, you can read the rest at Mamalode. ]

We have been having conversations lately, my son and I. Last night while I was putting on his pajamas, it was about the man on the road walking his dog. A week ago it was about porcupines, and how, for him, they have somehow come to mean "ouch." This afternoon, we looked at the leaves. They were so red--this one line of maples--and when I said, "Aren't they beautiful, El, all bright like that?" he said yes. "Yesss," he said, drawing out the sibilance, nodding his head. He looked up at me. He was wearing a winter hat. He was holding my hand. His father and I worry sometimes about him. More accurately, we worry about my leaving in the morning, followed by G's leaving from the daycare door, followed many several hours later with one of us returning, sometimes both (but often not before he's in bed), and how he interprets our comings and goings, how he feels about the drive away from home, if there is a part of him, come 3:30, 4:00 in the aft...

in Latin:   autumnus n French:   automne in Italian:   autunno in Spanish:   otoño in Portuguese:   outono in Arabic:   خريف in Lakota:   ptaŋyétu in Cebuano:   t ingdagdag in Somali:   d eyr in Greek:   φθινόπωρο in Chechan:   g üire in Thai:   ฤดูใบไม้ร่วง in Persian:   پاييز  in Czech:   podzim in Finnish:   syksy in Japanese:   秋 in Chinese:   秋天 in Danish:   efterår in Dutch:   herfst in low German:   h arvst in Old English:   hærfest in Icelandic:   haust Or, in Me: haystacks gravel-road drives dark earth and morning dried herbs acorns bonfires wild rice yelloworangeredbrown tractors and harvest time pomegranates warm cheese corners of swirling leaves dawn fog pumpkins auburn skies I see you,  you see me thinner trees cheers from fields on Friday nights warm soup hearty bread fr...

Ten years ago I drove down Highway 43 at dusk, watching the sun melt into a haze of orange over Deep Lake, and with one particular song that seemed to evaporate into the heavy air on repeat, I pulled my car into his parent's driveway. He was home from California, and in that moment, shooting baskets with his brother and two friends under the garage light and an assemblage of summer-drunk bugs. He wore a yellow shirt, thin and wide on his shoulders. When his gaze met mine through the windshield glass--that smile, that shirt, that sun, those bugs, the rest of our lives: there they were. What I remember of that summer was like that look: heady. Anyone who has not just walked toward love but fallen off the dock into the black midnight waters of it will know what I mean. You do not know you can talk that long, grin that big, stare that uninterruptedly, kiss that hard, laugh that loud, dream that vividly, hope that unapologetically until suddenly you are doing all of those things, unti...

The baby is sleeping. Ahh--you see what I did there? That little untruth? Because he is not a baby, Miss Emily B. Remember all the ways that he is now a boy: Pointed finger, wearer of shoes, hall-runner, door-slammer, hahahahahahaha laugher, tantrum-thrower, always-hungry-carrot-monster, the "balls," the "birds," the "dars" (cars), the on-the-lips-kisses, the too-long hair, the long and lingering and serious gazes, the mischief-twinkling-father's-son stares, the charging-full-speed-into-mama's-arms-and-tipping-us-both-over-from-the-force kind of hugs, the lengthening of  legs, the sculpting of shoulders. Which is to say, time is passing. All week here it has rained and rained, sheets of it so thick that puddles widened into ponds that ducks sat in, soaking. We watched it. Heard it against the windows at night. Heard thunder, too. Felt the winter recede with the rest of the snow into the rivers, which are now over the banks, gobbling up mud and ...

in French: printemps   in Albanian: pranvera in Romanian: primăvară   in Catalan: primavera  in Latin: ver in Icelandic: vor in Norweigan: vår in Danish: forår in German: frühling in Estonian: kevad in Finnish: kevät in Persian: بهار in Arabic: ربيع in Basque: udaberri in Zulu: intwasahhlobo in Czech: jaro in Lakota: wétu in Japanese: 春  Or, in Me: pretty treetops vines birds suddenly everywhere promises open streams rushing rivers muddy banks rutted roads sounds of footsteps and chirping and growth petals evening light morning fog sudden cotton clouds green berries children in trees  rain wet faces gratitude 

Emily, First of all, yes: that is still your name. In the past twelve months you have become mama and mother and mum, comfortable and soft and sing-songy and milk and bread. These are complex, intricate, beautiful things. They fit around your body like a winter blanket. But you are also still Em, still girl, still woman and partner and writer and dreamer and wanderer and springbud and bonfire and hawk. Sometimes it will surprise you, this speaking of your name, this connection to the you that was you before you became Mom. You will feel awe: that that you and this you can coexist. You will ask, How? Twelve months in, I will tell you: it doesn't matter. You can figure that out later, if you still want to. Think instead of the Why. Think instead of how wide and deep and expansive you are. Second, it will be okay: all of it. You will be scared of so many things. The labor and delivery, the tending of this helpless human being, the moment when the food prepared by family and fr...

In the weeks before you were born, the temperatures dipped colder than they had in 1400 days or nights. Wind chills barreled in at -35'. People did not move about much. But you. Warm inside me, more perfectly comfortable than perhaps you will ever be again, you shifted and rolled and trembled and swayed. I sat on a Saturday morning with my feet up and my hands pressed against the sides of my stomach, contemplating the millimeters of skin, space, and time that separated us, for now. You were coming soon, any day or night. Barefoot and short sleeved, I did not care about the cold, thought only of the way I would come to know your familiar weight in a different place, hot and milky in my arms. Now you are a year old. This has been the coldest winter in twenty years, let alone 1400 days: wind chills at -45', school called off en masse, the outside world a frozen pane of white and gray and blue. I am not wearing short-sleeve shirts or going barefoot. The rings on my fingers sl...

all ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again: but winter's not forever,even snow melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then? all history's a winter sport or three: but were it five,i'd still insist that all history is too small for even me; for me and you,exceedingly too small. Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave merely to toil the scale to shrillerness per every madge and mabel dick and dave --tomorrow is our permanent address and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do, we'll move away still further:into now  -- by e. e. cummings

Dinner on a weekday means this: something basic, something hearty yet fast, like soup with a slice of unbuttered bread, because the moment I am up and at the kitchen counter--my face four feet from his face, my hands not tickling the length of his wiggly body--my almost-nine-month-old son is at my legs, standing and pulling and leaning against them, his faultless countenance a half bowl of instinct and need. He wants to be held. It is both beautiful and heart-wrenching, the way he grips after me. "Elliot," I say to him, reaching under the nests of his arms, lifting him like a bird before settling him on my hip, pecking his nose, calming him instantly. "Baby, you're fine. Haven't I told you before? In this northern savanna, there are no cheetahs." Of course, he thinks I'm hilarious. Which is one of the thousand reasons why I keep lifting him up, holding him close, stirring the soup with one hand, not buttering the bread. *** About a month ag...