Love Is

by Barbara Bald

I miss you everyday,

not your humor-on-the-edge of sarcasm 
or your dig-your-heels-in-the-dirt, immovable parts,  but

           the veggie lasagna you made for me when you preferred meat,
           the way you hoisted my skis on their racks, when you preferred to read.

Look at this beauty!  you’d yell from the back room when a new warbler visited the yard.
What’s this one, Babe? you’d ask when a strange beetle landed on the deck. 

I miss the ‘Poet’s Lair’ sign you hand-crafted from wood though you never wrote a poem,
and the way you’d ask first about the spaniels when I answered your calls.

Mostly, I miss what you offered to those tender parts of myself 
that I was so afraid to love.