Grandma’s Last Christmas
Something took apart my beanie, ripping seam from seam,
stealing my favorite panel for its evil scheme.
Dad’s boxers and Mom’s flowered blouse likewise disappeared.
Our baby sister’s blankie the next thing commandeered.
Mother’s apron, then a snip from her wedding dress,
taken from an inner seam, so who would ever guess?
And who would even notice Father’s tie now missed an inch?
Was there no sacred item that they were loath to pinch?
Auntie’s favorite hanky. Uncle’s tobacco pouch.
Grandma’s antimacassar that graced her threadbare couch.
Grandpa thought the moths had been at his old red flannels,
and several of our curtains were missing parts of panels.
All of us superstitious about what we’d next lose,
a semi-official inquiry offered no clear clues.
Sister’s last year’s prom dress was the next sacrifice.
Was it a new type of moth? Was it rats or mice
operating with precision, taking a tidy square?
What creature did its robberies with such exquisite care?
A year passed and another year. We began our defections
as our lives led us here and there in various directions.
Home again for Christmas, then off again to lives
involving universities and jobs and kids and wives.
Until that special Christmas, gathered at Grandma’s bed,
with Grandpa at the foot of it and Mother at the head.
We kids gathered around each side, except, that is, for one.
That was the year that Sis had said she could not join the fun.
Our husbands, wives and girlfriends did not quite fill the space.
Not one of all our children quite made up for that face
missing in the middle. That favorite of all.
That special pesky sister, sliding down the hall
on a purloined skate board, or filching Halloween
candy from the sack you’d saved. Center of every scene
that involved tricks or mischief, yet only bent on fun.
No mean bone in her body. Not a single one.
We’d sung Gram’s favorite carol, and, about to sing one more,
we heard a footstep in the hall. A creaking of the door.
A cloth-swathed creature leaped at us, then swirled it overhead.
It settled over Grandma, resting lightly on her bed.
It was a quilt of many fabrics, many colors, many shapes
made of communion dresses, knickers and wedding capes,
prom dresses and baby blankets, doilies, curtain panels,
and right there in the middle were Grandpa’s old red flannels.
I found my purloined beanie and a boy scout badge I’d missed.
I even found a scarf I stole from the first girl I’d kissed.
We all gathered around it, and stories fell like snow
upon this quilt that told them all, and on Grandma below.
We ate our Christmas dinner gathered around that quilt.
Everyone so careful that not a crumb was spilt.
Grandma with her bed tray, fingered now and then
a scrap of cloth that told another story of back when.
We should have known, of course, that our sister was the schemer.
What other one among us was such an inventive dreamer?
She knew the time would come when, scattered far apart,
something would be needed to rejoin our family’s heart.
We had no idea then that what seemed a dereliction
was a noble enterprise, founded on her conviction
that our family history must somehow be recorded.
She kept her project secret from us, lest it be aborted.
All our buried memories needed to come to light,
so she bound them all together, in stitches neat and tight.
The prompts today are deep, official, light, conviction and bean.
When I tried to take this photo, a cluster of Daddy Longlegs unfolded from behind the bud. Every year they collect by the thousands on my walls and plants. Welcome back, long-legged annual visitors. Please click on photos to enlarge the view. This is the first time I’ve gotten close enough to see their eyes!! Oscar is here for his English lesson, but later I’ll establish a link to earlier views of huge clusters of these yearly guests.
If you’d like to see the video of a past year’s Daddy Longlegs invasion, go here:
And then go HERE to see the incredible view of the first year I hosted a Daddy Longleg convention.
Confession to an Errant Grandchild
From the first, I called you “Piggy,” my small bundle in a poke.
You grew into a ham, as though you got the silly joke.
In return, you called me “Brammer,” for your whole younger life.
I ignored your teenage insolence, which cut me like a knife.
For years, you called me nothing, while off roaming with your friends.
I waited for your twenties, when you would make amends.
Those foggy baby early years, I’d held you in my arms,
your most ardent admirer, a captive of your charms.
When your parents fussed, I was always on your side.
Made cookies for your naughty friends, embraced your errant bride.
Wiped your babies’ noses, patted their small behinds,
as they toddled off to school, observed from behind blinds.
So many decades later, sitting by my bed,
not knowing it was just a cold, fearing I’d soon be dead,
you asked why I was always there and why I didn’t balk
at your teenage indifference and your dismissive talk.
What was germane to the matter, I finally confessed,
was a truth which on your own you might have never guessed.
As I observed the recklessness of you and your rude crew,
In every naughty act, I saw a bit of me in you.
Prompt words today are brammer, germane, foggy, ardent and joke.
Black Reversal
Black as midnight. Black as coal.
Black as a remorseless soul.
Who dares face this shade of night?
This shade of death, color of fright.
Villains surround their back and nape
with a satin coal black cape.
Sirens slash their eyes with it,
then lower lids into a slit
to vanquish men and draw them in
to a life of sex and gin.
Shades of ebony and slate
do not grace the pearly gate.
Hear my warning. Hear it well—
black marks the entry gates to hell.
So turn your back to shades of night.
Save yourself. Turn on the light.
Black Jack, Black Sabbath, Black as sin?
These time-aged phrases have worn thin.
So do bigots fill our head
when we should realize instead
that black is not where evil starts.
There is no shade or hue to hearts.
Black is not the shade of sin,
and black is beautiful on skin!
For dVerse Poetics Shades of Black.
To see other poems on the subject of “Black” go HERE.
I recently found my old diary, pictured above. I was eleven years old when I wrote the entry below.
Dear Diary
August 20, 1958
Dear Diary,
After I got up I started to clean up living room and finished after dinner*. Then I read, played cards and watched t.v. Patti and I just had a fight. She wanted to listen to her radio and I was listening to t.v. or I should say watching it. Anyway, it causes a little static when the t.v. is on too so Patti turned off the t.v. I kept turning it on and she off. Well, finally I shut if off for a while and went up to listen to her radio. She didn’t like that either because I was humming, so she told me to read a book. I wanted to watch one of my favorite programs so I turned on the t.v. She started crying and I can’t bear to see a woman cry so I turned it off and told her for a girl of 15 who thinks she’s a lot older, she sure was a baby sometimes. For that, she hit me with a book hard.
P.S I’m writing the part about our fight outside.
………….
*We called lunch dinner back then.
Love the last line. Ha!!! Sorry, Patti, but this was too funny not to share. She now lets me watch TV whenever I want to plus she pays my land taxes and signs my income taxes for me and performs all sorts of other generous sisterly duties. xooxox
Out There
Back when you were innocent—back when you played the clown,
before your mind was jaded by seeking wide renown,
back before the pomp, the glory and the plaudits,
back before the news reports, the surveys and the audits,
back there when a diary preceded post and tweet,
there were words of innocence, secretive and sweet.
Back when every aspect of life was not for show,
back when information tended to move slow,
was there more than one hushed aspect of your life,
secrets not used against you, as lethal as a knife?
Everything’s now out there in selfies and YouTubes—
your angsts and loves and conquests, not to mention boobs.
What is left to grow inside, to flourish and to bloom?
What secrets left confined to the safety of your room?
Everything’s out spinning in the cruel world.
No way to get it back again, no secret ever curled
safely under the covers of a private book
where even your best friend has never had a look.
Do they still make diaries that aren’t electronic
where words languish on pages, quiet and laconic?
Where little girls confide their thoughts to a much-smudged page,
all their secret passions, their hurts and hopes and rage?
“Dear Diary” the sweetest confidant of all?
One that will never tell on you. One always there on call.
What will happen in a world where everything’s on view
forever to be classified, forever part of you?
Never will we ever leave our pasts behind.
Everything is indexed, simple enough to find.
Your sons and your daughters will peek into your past.
Google yourself now. Won’t they just have a blast?
Prompt words today were pomp, diary, jaded, aspect and clown.
I just stumbled upon my old diary from age eleven through thirteen yesterday. What a revelation. Facts garnered: I had someone sleep over at least three times a week, lots of relatives passed through one summer, my best friend went home mad a lot, I called lunch dinner and did the dishes every day, woke up late whenever I could and never revealed the names of secret crushes, even in my diary. I had a “dreamy” boy-girl party the year I turned 13 (a feat never repeated, at least among my friends) and danced with every boy except J (yuck.) Mr. G didn’t like me anymore (perhaps) and we seemed to take a lot of trips down to the Frosty Freeze at night––probably because other kids did the same and we had no other place to gather. Nothing, however, to preclude my running for public office and all easily burned if there were. And that simple event and the thoughts thereafter led to this poem.
,
Day of Flowers: Day of the Dead, Ajijic, Mexico
Click on first photo to enlarge all
On Friday, I went to decorate the burial plot that I adopted three years ago. Earlier, Oscar and Pablo had cleared out the weeds for me and Yolanda and I went Friday with flowers and to clean off the grave stones as well as to shovel out dirt that had fallen down from ground level onto the grave on the right. When we arrived, there were three young Mexican girls looking at our plot. They were very curious about who the people were who were buried there, since they had Anglo names, so I told them as much as forgottenman and I have been able to discover about the three people. Then a man from Guadalajara came and asked more questions.
When I started to go down to see about removing the dirt, (this plot of three graves is actually sunk down below ground level about four feet) one young girl said to wait and came back with a young man with a shovel who said he would clear out the dirt slide for me. He did hard labor in the sun for over a half hour, even removing stones and rocks that seemed impossible to dig up. When he left and I tried to pay him, he refused, even though I offered the money the traditional three times. It seems the boys from his school had come in a group to help out anyone who needed it. What a heartwarming experience.
The gravestones cleaned, the marigolds placed, we left and I returned the next day with Leslie, who had strung the papel picado for me that morning. We strung it around the fence surrounding the graves, then lit candles and arranged the dead bread, wine coolers for the women and a bottle of beer for the man, chocolate and more sprays of cloth flowers. Four musicians played very near by us the entire time. People came strolling by to talk. Scorching in the sun, we climbed up and sought the cooler shade. We walked around a bit and as you can see, there was no lack of flowers wherever we looked.
For Cee’s FOTD
When I got back from decorating the graves in the Pantheon, this lone artificial flower was lying by my kitchen door, having fallen off the bunch as we carried them to the car. The marigold I found in the street as I left the Dia de los Muertos art show that I had pieces in. Flowers abound during this time of the year.
For Cee’s Flower of the Day prompt.
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