Uncategorized

Paris: A Mother-Daughter Trip One September

We three wore comfortable shoes
and smiles on our cheeks
while chasing windswept leaves,
chocolate croissants,
and all the sights we could see:

the coyly smiling diva beneath her pyramid,
the Grande Dame in her scaffolding,
the famed tower on the Seine,

the tree lined boulevards,
marble-mouthed accents,
cigarette smoke and accordion chords,
the hushed blend of crepe trousers,
bicycle spokes, and Shakespeare and Company crowds.

The harsh scrape of blisters
and bistro chairs
clustered like the grapes
pressed and poured into glass balloons
poised near berried lips
as perfumed hands snapped selfies
beneath silk flowered awnings,
ribbon-braided balconies,
and stone so creamy you ached for a spoon.

All elegant and expected
and somehow, so not –

like the massive teddy bear
tucked in the crotch of a tree
and the painted elf carousel
at the street corner in Montmarte,
and all the memories that spilled
like sepia-toned love notes
from my daughters
when I spotted a stuffed bear
in the corner of my son’s closet
this Valentine’s week.

February 15, 2025 0

Same, Girl. Same.

What’s the best course of action? Inaction.

Feet in fuzzy socks, a throw across my lap,

a no across my lips. Hunkering down

in the softness of my hearth and home

with piano on the playlist and a good book

in my hand. While the crazy plays out, I’m

sipping on jazz and juice.

January 20, 2025 0

Making Spirits Bright

The house, cozy at dawn, and me in my bathrobe and soft Santa socks, Christmas lights glowing, playlist carols going… sipping my coffee and sorting my thoughts,

How lucky am I, I think — no, I know. How blessed to be snuggled beneath a warm velvet throw in the crook of a sectional with my laptop and nowhere to go while watching the sky shift to silver at dawn.

How simple, how sumptuous — an extravagance, bar none –that not everyone has. To have a sanguine soul in a world that exsanguinates souls. My gratitude is great. My cup overflows.

My sons are nestled all snug in their beds and my girls grown and glowing in orbits they threaded and hung on their own, weaving constellations that tell their tales, cast shimmering trails of goodness and grace.

While the boys, on the cusp of their own greatness, silver their way toward their own dawns, stars blooming bright on their baby cheeks and burgeoning lives, and the sky’s (no the universe) is their limit too, destinies unspooling just like their sisters’,, but entirely their own.

I celebrate all their stories, all their tangled strands of light unwound from my body, ever unwinding and widening, bright and brighter still, stringing their gifts like drops of Jupiter, like sun-wrangled, star-spangled miracle-bringers of goodwill and good trouble in this dark world.

There is no greater joy, no greater comfort for a mother’s heart than to see the babies she brought into this world out there in it, slaying and making spirits bright — hers most especially.

The Fates

They collect at the crossroads at dusk –or is it

dawn? – all the colors of their skin and clothes

(mocha and mist, morning and midnight), mingling

with all the colors of the day drizzling away – or is

it swizzling awake? — the sun behind them, bedding

down — or blinking open — orange like a cat’s eye,

like a red samurai in a providence sky, and these three

sisters stand before this sibylline sun, or under this

mantic moon, while tears stream like moire ribbons

from its surface, like tear-off to-do lists, like hotlines to

call if you have seen me, have met me, have known me,

They’re gathering numbers. They’ve

got yours already, and mine, clutched and bunched in their

skirts, their taffeta pleated pockets, silk threads to weave

windfalls or is it pitfalls? lunar – no solar – eclipses, feasts,

make that famines, all endlessly unleashed at the pull of

an umbilical, umbrellical handle in the sky,. The hands of fate — they make it rain.

December 6, 2024 0

A Teacher Reflects on this Past Week

This week was a rough ride. The kids are amped up on holiday vibes and election results. They’re practically vibrating. I’ve been shushing and redirecting and encouraging and fussing and trying my utmost to keep them focused and remember every day that I love them. I really do love them. But they are exhausting right this minute.

And I get it. Nobody is excited to be sitting in English class writing a perspective poem or a Great Gatsby essay.

This rowdy, raucous week was full of glad tidings for some and dark omens for others — the conversations running the gamut from Christmas carols and Thanksgiving-food-favorites to trending red and blue TikToks and tweets. From elation at the prospect of gas prices coming down to the horror at the slavery texts going ‘round.

Deportation headlines were tossed around like confetti by some, striking like anvils some others. There were book banning and family planning conversations. I even heard about the “her body, my choice” tweet that garnered thousands of likes.

And then there were the students who never even talked about the election at all. It hadn’t even been a blip on their Instagram algorithms.

And while I’m glad those students are innocent to the dark drama of politics, I’m sad too because I know they aren’t immune to the repercussions. My students are 17, 18, and 19-year-olds. So soon, they’ll be out in the very real world and learn what’s most important and essential to each-and-every one of their lives.

Through it all, I did my best to steer them back toward our task at hand: their education, their growth and understanding.

I teach literature. I teach other people’s perspectives. I teach how to walk two miles in somebody else’s shoes. I teach incredibly important lessons. But most importantly, I teach young adults. Young adults who will soon be grown adults who will soon, I hope, be intelligent rational, caretakers of our country. Because I really do love them all. And I really do believe in them all.

And Lord knows, we need intelligent, rational caretakers who can heal our nation and ensure all of us have the fundamental rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All of us.

November 10, 2024 0

The C Word

They come in threes, they say. Bad things come in threes. And sure

enough, bad tidings rode in on their serrated fonts in swirling

impatient portals: an unholy trinity of cyst, malignancy and mass.

One slung sideways, like a fanny pack across a kidney sack, a second,

mortared to wind pipe, spewing ash into places unknown, a third sucking

marrow from mammary glands like a motherfucker. Unsanctified settlers,

all. Mother of all that is Holy, who let in the false prophet, the devil, the

beast to cast rings around x-rays and pockets full of poison, ashen shadows

on MRI scans? All that rot and stink and bile planted like rancid Easter eggs,

tangled spiders’ nests, like hissing snakes in sacred sanctuaries… Such blatant

blasphemy. Such sick sacrilege. But then, while bad things come in threes, so

too, do good. And we believe in the Good — that Triumvirate of Truth: Faith

and Hope and Love. And the greatest of these is Love. Love lends strength and

courage to fight. When we harness for God the energies of love, then love will

help conquer all. Together, we’ll banish the bad for Good. Even the dirty, rotten C word.

The Winder Barrow Poem

(and for all our schools)

So much depends
upon

a brown door,
hollow,

framed with glass
windows,

between the gun &
children

It’s not enough.
Do something.

Sincerely,
Heather Peters Candela Teacher and Parent

Ode to Pillars of Salt

But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. Genesis 19:26

Scrolling social media
I see the headline --
Salted Watermelon: 
the “New” Viral Trend.
I roll my eyes, 
toss thoughts 
like spilled salt…
back to the ice-cold 
flesh of my childhood,
to the grosgrain-ribboned rounds,
chilled with river rock, 
freshly fished from
glittering undercurrents
and displayed, 
gravid & sweating, 
on weathered pine planks
bleached as the afternoon sun.
                               Thwump
goes the blade, sharp
and curved for cleaving,
heavy in my father’s right hand,
parting the Red Sea and
spilling juice and seeds 
in abundance, driving 
wedges wide and deep
as the smiles on our faces,
the shade in Mother’s gazes
as she administers
the covenant of salt,
eyes glittering 
with undercurrents,
hands chapped as weathered planks 
                               when
she upends the yellow-skirted,
umbrella-girded maiden
trapped in her canister,
salt like tears raining down,
before she turns, before she 
leaves him, this
bold salty beacon,
guiding us beyond silence
and taut apron strings.


              By Heather Peters Candela

August 3, 2024 0

When Rain Slips Through Sunlight,

silver tinsel sliding from angel palms
to slicken evergreens and other greens, 
white oaks, red maples, hydrangea-blue poms,
my vision rapt with heaven’s garland strings --

When ribbons of rain thin as fishing line fall 
from hosts of rods in the sky, casting, catching 
rainbows in their threaded, shimmering haul,
my pulse entangled and splashing --

When champagne streamers spill from glistening,
sun-scented fountains, filling the tender
flower flutes with honeyed nectar, fizzing
my soul – 	sublime-stoked, I seize the ember.

Burning, I haggle with poetry’s muse,
drunk and in debt to ephemeral views.

June 27, 2024 0

postmodernfamilyblog

Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters

Category