Tag Archives: Family relationships

“Hairlooms” for Cellpic Sunday

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I know.. weird photo…I just like it.  I took it to accompany a poem I was planning to put on Youtube along with an oral reading of the below poem from my soon-to-be published book, If I Were Water and You Were Air. I am reconsidering even doing the audio posting of poems on youtube, so will make use of it here and include the poem as an explanation of the photo.

Long Weekend

Her shoes on the floor next to the pot-bellied stove
do not have holes in them, as her father said,
but rather triangles and rectangles
and everyone is wearing them
laced up to below the ankle.
Her friend Marjorie, who has lots of shoes,
has pink ones
and Sheryl has a white pair
and even my new stepdaughter’s real mother
has shoes like this.

Her used Band-Aid lies in fetal position
on the new white sofa cushion,
her hair twister on the kitchen counter
along with a handful of pens she grabbed from my desk
and then abandoned.
Her clothes, like crumbs of her,
lie scattered down the hall.

She is asleep in the loft of my study,
in the nest she has chosen
for a place to stash herself, along
with those collected objects of my past
that have captured her fancy as she helped
with our unpacking of boxes.
With them, she has created a little world within our world:
a painted blown egg from the Tucson street fair,
assorted brushes and antique hair rollers,
hair combs I bought in Peking, African baskets to put them in,
a beach chair, a sheepskin rug, and her stuffed dog.

Stealing into my study to find paper and my one remaining pen,
I hear her gentle snores from the high space
at the top of the ladder on the wall behind my desk.
My new daughter––with us for our first weekend
as we open boxes in our new house.

The bouquet of wildflowers on the bookcase––
California poppies, creeping Jenny, sprays of honeysuckle––
she has learned all their names, along with moss roses, aloe vera and lobelia,
collecting them in her sorties out to the deck
to scare away the jays, feed peanuts to the squirrels.

She loves this house and wanted to unpack one more box
before bedtime––my bathroom box that held handy hair rubbers
and the tiny Chinese combs––both of them speedily added to her purloined collection.

She calls me Mom, her knee sticking through her Christmas tights.
She is a girl I can’t keep together––
already a hole in the turquoise top we bought together yesterday––
four tops, four pairs of tights
and a pink jacket.
Socks, next visit.

When she leaves to go back home, I plant dahlias and purple salvia.
I find the hidden box of toothbrush, toothpaste, and acne medicine
she has secreted in her loft above as though staking her claim.
I find cups to put them in,
put them on the counter in the bathroom next to ours.

For Cellpic Sunday

Puddle-Jumping

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Puddle-Jumping

Raindrops fall and splat and skitter,
bringing sheen and gloss and glitter.
In my dreams I hear them falling,
try to wake to heed their calling.
When exactly do I know
it’s time to leave my bed and go
outside to splash in rain-filled gutters,
ignoring Grandpa’s warning mutters
that I’ll catch a cold today
if I go outside to play?

He says it’s raining cats and dogs,
but all I find outside are frogs,
proving his idiom a lie
as nothing’s falling from the sky
but rain and blossoms from the tree
that stretches its limbs over me.
I make my way, laborious,
through mud and goo most glorious,
then reach the ditch and wash feet off
in the rushing water trough.

I see Grandpa watching me,
warm and dry and splatter-free.
But then he’s gone, no doubt to see
what’s playing now on the TV.
But, just as it begins to pour,
there’s Grandpa coming out the door!
Barefooted, he jumps in my puddle,
gives my shoulders a warm cuddle,
then repeats the old refrain
that this day is “Right as rain!”


Prompt words today are rain, idiom, skitter, exact, dreams.
Images by Amy Reed and Nicholas Bartos on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Final Rights

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Final Rights

The legacy our mother left seems to have something missing.
Is it just coincidence I think I saw you kissing
her lawyer shortly after her funeral today?
It reminded me of earlier behavior, I must say.
Your high school English teacher whom you later held at bay
only after he had raised your grade from F to A.
Do I mean to insinuate it may have been a factor
in the raising of your grade that you’re such a primo actor?
Feigning school girl crushes until you’ve achieved your aim
and seducing gullible lawyers? Do I think that’s your game?
I must admit this codicil  that you have lately found
gives rise to questions. You should realize that we are bound
to question her late change of mind, leaving the bulk to you
when all the time that she was ill you never were in view.
The lawyer swears it’s aboveboard. These were our mother’s wishes.
Did she forget those countless times you would not do the dishes
but left the job to me as you hurried out the door?
The times you defied curfew, tracked up her just-mopped floor?
Because I was her favorite,  was it, then, her guilt
that made her deed to only you the house that Grandpa built?
Sister dear, your goose is cooked, for just a month ago
Mom fired the lawyer you seduced and hired one you don’t know.
He filed a new will signing the house over to me.
Mom foresaw your shenanigans and said they would not be.
Your lawyer’s response to your wiles? A small sin of omission.
Who could blame him for collecting his amorous commission?

Prompt words today are legacy, missing, reminded, insinuate and factor. Although the poem is fiction, this is actually the house I grew up in. 

Bearings

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Bearings

“I’ve lost my bearings,” she said to me, perplexed. She was sitting alone in her room, surrounded by piles of clothing on the bed and floor around her—the collapsed small tents of abandoned full skirts, the shards of scarves and small mismatched clutterings of shoes.

She had been abandoned in a daydream world that only she lived in, but that she seemed as confused by as she was by those of us who tried to visit her there. For her, even changing clothes had become an insurmountable obstacle—a challenge that rivaled childbirth, an unfaithful husband, an addicted son, an autistic grandson. It rivaled the war she’d staged against her much-younger sister—the power she held over that sister by her rejection of her. It rivaled her efforts to enter the world again as a single woman and to try to win the world over to the fact that it was all his fault. It rivaled her insistence that it was the world that was confused in refusing to go along with all her beliefs and justifications.

She had barely if ever left a word unspoken when it came to an argument. It was so simple, really. She was always right. That everyone in the world, and more particularly her younger sister, refused to believe this was a thorn in her side. The skin on her cheek itched with the irritation over the unfairness of the world. She had worn a path in it, carving out a small trench so that the skin even now was scaly with that road traversed over and over again by one chewed-off fingernail. “Are you she?” She asked me, and when I admitted I was, she added, “Oh, you were always so irritating. Even as a little girl. Why could you never be what anyone else wanted you to be? You were always so, so—yourself!”

It was my chance, finally, for an honest conversation with this sister 11 years older—more a crabby mother always, than a sister. A chance if she could keep on track long enough to remember both who I am and who we both once were.

“So what was wrong with how I was, Betty? With how I am?”

“Oh, you were always so . . . . “ She stopped here, as though struggling for a word or for a memory. I saw her eyes stray to the floor between the door and the dresser. “There’s that little fuzzy thing there,” she said. I could see her eyes chart the progress of this creature invisible to me across the room.

I hung on to the thought she had so recently abandoned. “But me, Betty. What do you find wrong with me?”

Her eyes came back to me and connected, suddenly, with a sort of snap that made me think we were back in the same world again as she contemplated by last question. I tried to keep judgment out of my own gaze—to keep her here with me for long enough to connect on at least this one question.

“You were,” she said, and it was with that dismissive disgusted tone she had so often used with me since I was a very small child. “You were just so mystical!”

I was confused, not sure that the word she had used was the one she meant to use.

“What do you mean by mystical, Betty?” I sat on the bed beside her and reached out for the static wisps of hair that formed a cowlick at the back of her head—evidence of the long naps which had once again taken over her life, after a long interim period of raising kids, running charities and church prayer circles, and patrolling second-hand-stores, traveling to PEO conventions and staying on the good side of a number of eccentric grandchildren.

“Oh, you know. All those mystical experiences! The E.S.P. and all those other stories you told my kids. And Mother. Even Mother believed you.”

Then a haze like a layer of smoke once more seemed to pass over her eyes, dulling her connection to this time and reality and to me.

Her chin trembled and a tear ran down her cheek. She ran one fingernail-chewed index finger over and over the dome of her thumb and her face broke into the crumpled ruin of a child’s face who has just had its heart broken, the entire world of sadness expressed in this one face. I put my arms around her, and for the first time in our lives, she did not pull away. We rocked in comfort to each other, both of us mourning something different, I think. Me mourning a sister who now would never be mine in the way that sisters are meant to be. Her mourning a self that she had not been able to find for a very long time.

“Oh, the names I have been called in my life,” I was thinking.

“Oh, the moon shadows on the table in the corner. What do they mean?” She was thinking.

The last time I gave my sister a fortune cookie, she went to the bathroom and washed it off under the faucet, chuckling as though it was the most clever thing in the world to do. She then hung it on a spare nail on the wall.

When I asked her if she needed to go to the bathroom, she nodded yes, and moved in the direction of the kitchen. Then she looked at the news scroll on the television and asked if those were directions for her. If there was something she was supposed to be doing. And that picture on the wall. What was it telling her she was supposed to do?

In the end, I rubbed her head until she fell asleep, covered her and stole away. I’d fly away the next morning, leaving her to her new world as she had left me to mine from the very beginning.

Prompt words today are hang on, contemplate, daydream, bearing and surround.

Self-Realization

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Self-Realization

He’s going to take a small vacation—a hiatus, so to speak—
but his family has mixed feelings toward what it is he’ll seek.
He says he must discover the words to his own song,
but they wonder why it is that they cannot sing along.
It seems this is one journey that he must make alone.
They can’t Skype him from their laptops. They can’t call him on the phone.

Organization for his  journey will be strictly alphabetical,
making for a travel plan that is less theoretical
but based on whimsey—something that’s been missing from his life
since he embarked on his career and since he took a wife.
He might start with Algeria, Australia or Agora.
And next choose Bangladesh, Berlin or Bora Bora.

Then he’ll take a plane to Cuba, to Columbia or Crete.
Until he’s finished the whole alphabet, his trip won’t be complete.
What he’ll learn on this journey, they’ll have to wait and see.
“This journey’s not for you,” he says. “This journey’s just for me.”
He’s retiring from his family for a year or two.
“I’ll be a different man,” he says, “when I come back to you.”

His family can’t believe it when he commences packing,
and when he’s gone, at first they feel that he’s sorely lacking.
But after a few months, the hole he’s left just slowly fills.
The kids take problems to Grandpa, and Mother pays the bills.
His son enrolls for driver’s ed and learns to drive the car.
A new guy comes to town to fill his old spot at the bar.

At dinner parties now his wife becomes the handy single,
so she can pick and choose occasions wherein she can mingle.
The TV’s set on programs other than golf and fights,
and no one ever chides them to turn off all the lights.
His daughters’ dates don’t have to meet with him to be okayed.
His wife does not consult on each and every purchase made.

Slowly, all his family feels less and less bereft.
After a year they barely remember that he’s left.
So when after two years they hear a key turn in the lock
one night approaching midnight, it’s somewhat of a shock
to find their old dad home again–bearded, stooped and worn,
long locks descending from a head formerly neatly shorn.

No arms reach out to greet him. No shouts of joy are heard.
They find his presence strange and his appearance most absurd.
When he sees they’re watching “Dancing with the Stars,” he’s clearly shaken,
and he’s crushed they are not curious about the path he’s taken.
In every empty room, there are still lightbulbs glistening,
but when he starts to chide them, he finds no one is listening.

When he goes to check his car, he finds that it is missing.
He hears noises in what was his den and finds his wife who’s kissing
a stranger he’s not seen before. Has his whole life gone crazy?
He takes some time off for himself and things go upsy daisy?
Then, finally, the truth hits. While off looking for himself,
it seems that his whole family has placed him on a shelf.

His son has commandeered the car, his daughters came and go,
never introducing their dad to any beau.
His old job has been filled and his family’s fine without him.
Even buddies at the bar seem somehow to doubt him.
He sleeps down in the basement while some guy sleeps in his bed.
He’s been divorced for desertion, or so the papers said.

His wife’s new husband’s given him a week to pack his stuff
and head once more into the world, where living will be rough.
All those years he quested to find out more about him,
it seems to be the truth that his life went on without him.
So though he found himself at last, there’s no place where he fits.
Having a self with no place left to put it is the pits!!

 

 

Prompts today are mixed feelings, theoretical, hiatus, song and journey.

Black Sheep

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Black Sheep

Your baseball cap conspicuous among the Easter hats,
you intersperse beatitudes with sounds of batting stats,
and when you are not muttering, you whistle or you hum.
Everywhere we’ve gone, you have stuck out like a sore thumb.

I try to introduce you to acquaintances or friends,
but your chatter never ceases. Your prattle never ends.
These one-end conversations are getting rather dry.
We cannot get a word in, so in time we do not try.

Last year you kidnapped Grandpa and took him to a bar,
then left him in an upstairs room—teeth floating in a jar.
Once we had reclaimed him, we gave thanks that you had vanished,
and this note is just to tell you we’ve decided you are banished.

You’ve embarrassed us at Christmases, at Easters and Thanksgivings,
so we have decided that we have certain misgivings
regarding future visits. In short, we hope you’ll never
seek to reattach past family ties we hereby sever!

Prompt words today are sound, carriage, conspicuous and baseball.

Confession to an Errant Grandchild

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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.

Career Guy

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IMG_3606

Career Guy

By the time that he gets home at night, his wife is muttering,
but he’s too busy for analysis. Therapy’s not his “thing.”
She says they must examine whether they should part.
He says business takes precedence over affairs of heart.
Even when he’s finally home, his attention’s rarely won
by all her little anecdotes of what the kids have done
at school and right here at home. She tries to draw him in,
but still his mind’s not with her. He’s intent on where he’s been.

This goes on for years and years until one day he finds
when he gets home at nine o’clock, that she has drawn the blinds.
And when his key turns in the lock, there’s no one there to greet him—
no friendly cooking odors or kids are there to meet him.
Nobody in the bedrooms. Nobody in the hall.
When he enters the kitchen, nobody there at all.
He tries to think what day it is, but he doesn’t know.
Could it be a Friday night? Could they be at the show?

He searches for a note that says where everyone may be,
but his intensive searching ends in futility.
No toys are scattered on the floor. Their closets are all bare.
No TV noise is blaring. No footsteps on the stair.
His briefcase on the table has papers sticking out.
He has a lot of work to do. Of this there is no doubt.
And since it’s not his nature this paperwork to shirk,
he mixes a martini and settles down to work.

Of course his business flourishes once there are no distractions.
He need not fill his home life with discussions and reactions.
He has gained three hours or more to work thus unencumbered.
Frozen dinners and new contracts filled his life until he slumbered.
He saw their pictures on the fridge when mixing a libation,
and once a year he saw them when they were on vacation.
He walked his daughter down the aisle the day that she was married,
trying to fulfill his role, though he was slightly harried

over the Dixon contract, yet he sat worry aside
just long enough to witness as she became a bride.
Later there were grandkids and other celebrations.
He sent his warmest wishes and his congratulations.
He always paid the child support on time with no exceptions.
He made a show at baby showers and birthdays and receptions.
But he never really showed them his affection much until
he finally revealed it, much later, in his will!!!

 

Prompt for today are busy, anecdote and examine. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/04/17/rdp-wednesday-busy/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/04/17/fowc-with-fandango-anecdote/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/04/17/your-daily-word-prompt-examine-april-17-2019/

Generational Angst

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Generational Angst

She could not quench her anger over all the agitation
caused by her father’s ire, or her mother’s castigation.
Their home life was a parody of what a life should be.
They were a group of separate “I’s.” There was no “us” or “we.”

He surveyed his daughter mainly from afar.
The only time she deigned to talk was to usurp the car.
She was so disrespectful he could barely hold his tongue.
Why was it so difficult to converse with the young?

She’d thought she’d have a daughter to fuss over and dress.
but when it came to this one, she was driven to confess,
her daughter lately gave no sign that she had once adored her.
Rather, all the indications were that she abhorred her.

Her mother dressed in mom jeans and her dad tucked in his shirts.
Then looked askance when she appeared in bandeaus and short skirts.
When they tried to speak her language, it only caused distress.
TBH, they had not a clue, and she could not care less.

This is the modern family. The parents sorely vexed.
The daughter is embarrassed, her mom and dad perplexed.
Why can they not communicate? Where is the veneration
that seems to be missing in this modern generation?

Parents cannot understand because they don’t recall
all of the resentment, embarrassment and gall
that they once felt for parents back when they were teens.
This disdain from their daughter was passed down in their genes.

This too shall pass, I’d like to say. Give it a little time.
The year will come when being parents will not be a crime.
Her growing up and having kids will be the end of it.
You’ll be her heroes once again when you can baby sit!

 

Words of the day are quench, parody and castigation.

It seems that Daily Addictions is no longer publishing prompts, so if someone knows of a daily word prompt not given below, please leave a comment for me in this post with a permanent link to that prompt. (One that will work everyday)

Here are today’s links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/rdp-monday-quench/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/11/12/fowc-with-fandango-parody/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/castigation/

Family Night

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daily life color207

Family Night

Grandma’s tired of pussyfooting, Mama’s tired of tact.
Daddy has lost his silken tongue. I fear that is a fact.
Grandpa has no further wish to sugar coat and pander.
We’ve had an epidemic of hereditary candor! Continue reading →