Day 3. Revisit
“If you Blink, You’ll Miss it” 6×6 in, oil on panel, framed
Looks like I’m staying with the hummingbird again for day 3. I also took some time to edit a poem I wrote during the last 31 in 31. It’s still not quite there, still a little clunky in places but, I suppose so are those memories that confront us out of nowhere– the ones that give us the greatest pause.
Memory
The older women in line
At the grocery store, watching me wrestle a toddler, said:
Walk through this life wide-eyed
Because
It goes by fast
If you blink you’ll miss it
As though it were even possible
To really watch the seed grow
Instead we saw the first green
Pushed up from the soil in a plastic cup
Then taller, eventually a leaf waving to us
Then another
Every change, though expected, a surprise
The image of your small face,
Wild with excitement
Holding your sprouted bean like a trophy
Comes dashing into view
You were ready to grow enough
To make a whole pot
serve them on Mondays over rice
Because of course they were right–
Our lives exist on hummingbird’s wings
Darting from one shining thing to the next
Until a memory holds us in a hover
Maybe now with my quiet cart,
lingering over the peaches to see
Which is ripest
My hands all too free to
check something off the list–
Know what we all really mean
Is that after the long days
And the too-short years
When you undoubtedly wonder where it all went
You’ll have the time to savor
What then you could not have possibly.
Denise Hopkins
January 3, 2026
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