Emily Dickinson Visits Pamela Sinicrope

A Fantasy for Pam You are here in your house with your sons and your husband and all the arrangements you have made with furniture, fabrics and designs to make this house also this home. And I have the sudden realization you have opened a gate to Eden and invited me into the Garden. Pamela, you and I have an ideal rapport, like spring and summer in all of their essentials or tree roots with soil as they fan out through the ground for the sake of trunk, limbs and leaves. Oh, so much joy resides in service! Surely you feel it too. I learned early to cherish small things, humble, precious things, and people who smile when they call themselves NOBODIES. There are so many connections everywhere we are never really alone. The children in my neighborhood, boisterous, carefree, in the flush of innocence, arrive at the steps of my house in Amherst. They turn their expectant faces upward until I appear on the small balcony. Then they cheer and dance a little. I slowly lower a basket by a rope, and it dangles slightly as it reaches their tiny arms. The oldest one cradles the basket, as they disappear with many thank-you's cast over their disappearing backs. When they reach their private place - we adults do not know its location! - they untie the ribbon, and there are the gingerbread cookies I baked for them this morning. Of course, they share these gifts equally. Sharing is half of their pleasure. But there is an additional gift they sometimes find, but other times miss. I enclose a brief poem I composed while the cookies baked. Verses that take me no longer to imagine than the cookies to bake. Did I not say I appreciate small things, and I sense their smallness is a disguise. It disguises things destined to grow greater than seems possible. Is that not the same faith you have in your sons? That you had when love first flowered between you and your husband? That you felt swell inside your mind when you wrote your first poems? These things bless our lives which are always growing toward some new wonder, some fresh beauty. We are summoned to such joy. It is our birthright.