Confessions of a Grandma

  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants was written by Robin Wall Kimmerer in 2013. She is a scientist not a poet, but to me, she asks an essential poetic question when she wonders why it is -- and then makes a scientific study to find out -- that there is something so beautiful about a field of yellow and purple flowers. In a field I pass on my walk: Goldenrod and purple loosestrife. Goldenrod and joe pie weed

 Someone called me "graceful" the other day. Someone who hasn't spent a lot of time in my presence. Yesterday I was in some kind of a hurry to get out onto the deck. I opened the glass slider and smashed right into the screen slider. My father sometimes called me "Gracie." It wasn't meant as a compliment. Like after the time I was carrying a cake to the table, tripped, landed on the floor with the cake flipping frosting side down as well. Then there was the time -- not so funny at all -- when I went to sit next to my dad on the couch but banged into his knee, the one he had just had surgery on. There may have been words a bit more forceful than gracie that time. The time I was walking into my high school  --  spectacular fall with books and papers flying in the wind -- just as a school bus was pulling up so many of my fellow students got to see the show -- that made the year book. I'm not remembered for any of my academic accolades. I had a classroom of