Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

The silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.

As I close my cabin door in the sunrise, the cold clean air moving down from the mountains, and the taste of that air, comes to me as if from childhood.

Lacking the accident’s transforming cinematic

As I grew into my twenties, then thirties, and learned about other mothers – the complications and layers of hurt and mistrust, of envy

And now that she’s coming here, into our silence, it also makes me afraid.

Back Dungeon, Percy’s, Top Percy’s, the Scrub, Roped Down, Stone Yard, Nursery.

wish, for the thousandth time that I had been older than I was when she fell ill. I feel sure more maturity would have brought with it

I do not look for Helen, but I know she knows I ask it; and I know too that she has other, deeper forgivenesses to consider, or to decide against.

Anything that had lived could make itself useful, become nourishment in death, my mother said.