“DomesticWhere's the wisdom in erasing a loved one's mess,so akin to his signature? Your honor, I only meantto strew the immaculate in his wake. To wipe the pathahead and behind reasonably clean. Futile, yes,but weren't such gestures essential to love's disciplineonce upon a time? Daily, I harvested dropped fruit peelsand socks. I chased him through life with dustpanand broom, smoothed his body dents from the bed,soothed the mud tramped floors. Did I sin in this?Better to leave the habitat sweetly reeking of himthan to spend years scrubbing up evidence of his existence.Archaelogists centuries hence may marvel at such relics:his mustard stained napkins, toothpicks chewedto splinters. Never let it be said that in my zeal to clean I robbed the future's museums. Whoam I to call what flies to either side of the trailhe blazes--half read magazines, cups of scummedover coffee and mashed out cigarettes--dirt?”

“...and again she wished for Sherwood, and the dappled roof of leaves that never weighed upon her. She pulled her scarf closer around her and thought, I would rather live in a hut in the woods; a hut like the one of my first memories, with a clean-swept dirt floor, and a brown-eyed boy watching me from behind his mother's skirts as I watched him from behind mine.”

“Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,” he said, “That from the nunnery, Of they chaste breast and quiet mind.”I looked up at him, and said the next line, “To war and arms I fly.”“True, a new mistress now I chase,” he said.“The first foe in the field,” I said, and let him draw me closer.“And with a stronger faith embrace,” he said.“A sword, a horse, a shield.” And the last word was whispered against his chest, still looking up into those eyes, searching his face.“Yet this inconstancy is such, As thou too shalt adore,” he whispered against my hair.I finished the poem with my face pressed against his chest, listening to the beat of his heart, that truly beat with my blood. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more.”

“One time I actually cleaned out my closet so good I ended up on the cover of Time magazine.”

“In His wisdom, our God formed us out of the dirt. In His empathy, He spent a life walking through our dirt. In His grace, He let His sacrificial blood fall to the dirt. Then in His love, he picks us up from that dirt.”

“I shall bring him his tea and work myself to death by the time I am thirty bearing children and scrubbing floors and working in the fields digging turnips till my hands bleed and my back gives out and everyone urges me to keep on for just one more year, at which point I will die of exhaustion and the meagerness of my own life. I will love him and care for him, will never tell him to get his own tea, or sweep the ashes from the hearth or give birth to his own twelfth child himself.”