((For lack of anything else to say, I’m posting here a poem a day….)
Her Daughter’s Destiny
If she mirrored me
she refused to know it,
choosing, instead,
the finer lines
of her father’s reflection.
There were times
I wished her gone,
her and her herd
of fragile unicorns –
or cornered where
I couldn’t watch
their golden dances
filling the space in my mirror.
When she left that spring,
the corners grew shadows.
She set free the unicorns
and took all of my mirrors
with her.
……….
Her Son Leaving Home
Young Dionysus,
a faded blue bandana
circling his head like a halo,
layers himself with choices
forgotten by the gods.
He smells of earth, of dreams,
of rain that flows with ease
along acres of hilly woodland,
filing some final need
in the deep hollows of stones.
He releases himself to the magic of motley,
to the wind, alive in his unbound hair,
to sweet pickings, scattered
like ripening berries
along miles of roadside vines.
As he leaves, the hearthfire
crackles softly.
Blackbirds loose feathers
from the heights of sky-borne oaks,
and honey bees sing to the sun.
(For lack of anything else to say, I’m posting here a poem a day….)
Ode to Opal
The opal, they say,
scatters the heat of the wearer,
turns her fickle, they say
(if she is not centered)
– like light in moving water,
like water on warm stone.
(Let her who wears it
beware.)
The opal, they say,
is partly water,
softer than crystal
(though not as clear),
smoother than pearl
(though not as soft),
as fragile as a heart
nearly mended.
Break it and it bleeds —
water scattering light
like dreams at dawn.
(Let him who holds it
beware.)
The opal, the say,
attracts joy, love,
creative spirits
that fire the heart,
sends from its center
the magic of all other stones,
– an irresistible call
to iridescence.
Spring. And rain. And in my deepest being a reflection of what’s happening in the deeper earth. I’m struggling.
And so I go back into my stacks of poetry, looking to remember who I’ve been as a way of beginning to find who I am becoming. Age 71. Still becoming. Spring, again.
For lack of anything else to say
I’m posting here a poem a day,
Most are old and conjure years
rife with hopes and dreams and fears.
Rippling through my flow of time,
they maybe sing, but never rhyme.
Perhaps someday they’ll fill a book.
If not, it’s just some chance I took.
A poem from my 30th year:
Riding the Heartland Current
When the sun finally slips
through the clouds
spilling into that lake
in high Wyoming,
it is only a matter of time before
the muddy waters reach Montana,
where the Missouri gorges itself
on the Jefferson, Calatin, and Madison,
binding its fate to the press
of a season’s passion.
Along the banks at Bismarck,
Spring becomes a time for waiting.
And even at bold St Louis,
bright fishing boats
hold to their moorings,
sheltered from the sudden currents
that rush Spring’s murky dreams
toward the hungry Mississippi.
It is never wise
to swim the dark Missouri;
As everyone in Nebraska knows
the mud must run its course
through each Missouri Spring.
A day like this in early Spring would be the beginning of our “stoop sitting” season.
There were no driveways in that old urban neighborhood, with no basketball hoops in them. But we all had stoops. The stoop was for the kids; the upstairs porches for the adults, from which they reigned over that blue-collar neighborhood with watchful eyes.
My cousins and I would sit on the bottom step of the 3-family-house stoop (where most of them lived) and play Jacks on the sidewalk or Stoop Ball (which we called Fly’s Up) from the first two steps using a super pinkie ball. The sidewalk itself would be chalked with games of Girls Are and Hopscotch. I couldn’t find anything online defining our game of “Girls Are,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s just the name we gave it. Maybe it’s even a game we made up.
There wasn’t much of a backyard, back then, and within what there was my grandparents had planted various greeneries that I thought were weeds until I saw my grandmother make concoctions for her arthritis out of them.
Now I live in a middle class neighborhood where people don’t seem to ever sit out on their stoops. Except for us.
The front of our house, with its minimal stone stoop, faces south, so it’s the best place to sit and have a cup of tea in the morning or relax after dinner. In a few weeks it will have plants on and around it, but it’s still too cold to get the plants in. But we all sat out there in the sun for a while today — the only family in the neighborhood who stoop sits.
We do have a back yard, where the vegetable garden will go again, bigger this year, and where perennials wait for a stronger sun while crocuses, daffodils, and a yucca plant that never dies off in the winter are pressing their way into Spring. And in the shady side yard, where the irises are are just sprouting, the heavy old cement Pan statue that I have hauled around through four moves, now sits, down and dirty, playing his silent pipes.
Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
While I believe that the above quote is true, that’s not the reason I haven’t been blogging here.
The main reason is that I’ve been setting up a WordPress.com blog for my 50th college reunion as a way of generating some nostalgic interest among my former classmates — in hopes of getting them to attend. The reunion isn’t until the Fall, and the site won’t go live until May, but I’ve been brushing up on html codes so that I can add a little pizzazz to the look of the site. I don’t have a great design eye, but, using a simple WordPress template as the basis, I’ve been able to figure out how to insert lines to break sections and how to format a table within a page, and how to do some other tweaking that I wanted to do. I actually like doing this stuff, and hours can go by before I notice that my butt’s numb from sitting so long.
The other reason is that I’m figuring how to knit a sweater on a bias. I have a pattern, but I’ve had to change the stitch count because I’m using a different yarn. I’m sure getting my math-phobic brain some exercise.
Then, of course, there’s my FaceBook games of Scrabble, Lexulous, and Wordscraper, which I also do for brain exercise. And lately I’ve been doing an online picture puzzles as well.
I’m reading mystery novels and listening to an unabridged audio version of The Help, recommended by a friend and downloaded from my library. The narrative is totally engrossing, pulling me into the lives of everyday people whose lives were affected by the Civil Rights turmoil of the early 60s.
I just finished reading (for a book club I hope to join later this month) Home Repair, which has a story line very close to my own life’s narrative.
It is definitely great to be retired so that I can have this fun playing.
I did notice, however, that the taxes on my Social Security went up. Now, that doesn’t make for much fun.
I have to remind myself that it could always be worse.
This is the kind of day for skiing or snowshoeing or snow-fort building. But I don’t do any of them. I can’t seem to even walk very far these days.
But today, with the sky a clear blue and a sun that has finally left the falling snow behind, I bundle up and get myself outside for the first time in weeks. I take a short walk around a few blocks — just about as much as my joints can take today.
When I come back to the house, I haul out a stool and sit on the small porch. I close my eyes. For a moment I am back in my babyhood carriage — the old kind from the 40s, with an oil cloth cover that rolls up to my chin, so that I am warm and snuggly inside, even though my nose is cold. The sun is warm and bright on my closed eyelids. I want to be a child again.
I think of my mother — how young and happy she was when she pushed me in that carriage — how disappointment and dementia drained from her spirit what was the best of her. I think of her because her 95th birthday would have been this month; she would have made it had she lived for three more months. But it’s just as well that she didn’t; those months would have only extended her hell on earth.
I could sit here all day, pretending. But I have a math challenge to confront — figuring out how to use a sweater pattern I like but using a different weight yarn and different size needles. It’s all algebra, but math-challenged that I am, I have to work myself up to grappling with setting up the equations. I can’t seem to keep my body in shape, but I try to do so with my brain.
I do have to deal with my body, though, despite the back problems. I’m hoping I can try the “chair yoga” this week at the senior center in town — that is if it’s not canceled again because of a another snow storm. And I’ve begun firing up my wii around 4 p.m. every day just to do some balance and aerobic exercises, which I seem to sorely need.
We are all waiting for spring. But for today, I’ll take the sun on snow.
Under his white cassock, the good-looking young priest is wearing sneakers and jeans. I can see them peeking out from underneath the garment’s neat hem. The inside of the 110 year-old ornate church of my childhood is colder than this winter morning in the urban outside. The seat of the wooden pew is freezing my butt.
The church’s boiler has stopped working, and all through the service periodic clangings continue to irreverently punctuate the “words of the Lord.”
I am sitting in the exact spot in which I sat almost exactly a month ago. That was for my mother’s funeral service. This time it’s for my aunt’s (the wife of my father’s brother). They say that death comes in threes. I wonder if my 87 year-old aunt sitting to my left will be the third. I hope, instead, what will count is my dead desktop computer, which, at the moment is awaiting a possible resurrection on the repair desk of my most trusted geek. These are things over which I have no control.
I only go back to my home town for weddings and funerals, all of which include rituals celebrated in this spectacularly vaulted nave that is bordered by detailed mosaic depictions of the Stations of the Cross, above which large elaborate stained glass windows tell the rest of the story. The aesthetics of the church inspires awe, even without the faith that sustains it.
Neither my cousin nor I join in the line to receive Holy Communion. It has been decades since either one of us believed and practiced what we had been so carefully taught during our 13 years of Catholic schooling. When we sit around the table hours after her mother’s burial, my cousin and I and dredge up shared memories of some of our more innocent times — the May processions in which we tossed rose petals as we walked down the aisle (“one, two, three, this is for you, Baby Jesus…”) My mind slips away to the less innocent scenes from the movie “The Polish Wedding.”
We spend hours sitting around that table — my cousin and I and our remaining paternal aunt and uncle — sharing family stories and attitudes that had somehow eluded me during the 17 years I lived in the bosom of a clan that had, apparently, quickly separated into two camps — the “laws” and the “in-laws,” although which was which depended on whose perspective one adopted.
The story that surprises me most is one associated with the version my mother told of a seminal event in my life about which I once wrote a poem. In my mother’s version, her mother saved my young life; in the “in-law” version, my other grandmother believed that my mother was withholding medical treatment for me in favor of “leeches.” I see now that it became a stand-off between two matriarchs, and family relationships through the generations suffered as a result.
While it was my mother’s side of the family that I came to know best, it was an aunt on my father’s side who most impressed me, even though I only knew her for a very short while in my pre-teens.
Eleanor married my Uncle John, to the chagrin of my paternal grandmother. Eleanor was a free spirit, odd and artsy and strikingly beautiful. She had her kitchen ceiling painted red, she started to teach me how to sketch faces, and she sewed me a lavish ruffled robe that I wore until I could no longer button it across my chest. Suddenly (or so it seemed to me) she and my uncle were gone — moved out of state, out of touch.
And, in our post-funeral table conversation with my relatives from that side of the family, I learn just how strict my paternal grandmother was, refusing to accept her non-conformist daughter-in-law and leaving the couple with little alternative but to create a life for themselves apart from family expectations. I begin to understand the difficulties that my mother had in fulfilling her daughter-in-law role.
Eleanor and John had children — five, I think. I have never met them or been in touch with them. My cousin has but lost track of their lives long ago.
We have been a family burdened with expectations, and both my cousin and I acknowledge (with some private pride) that we opted not to meet a select number of them.
We are the matriarchs, now — much different in attitudes and expectations from our foremothers.
I started blogging on November 29, 2001, and the old bloghome is still here, reminding me why I started and how I grew as a “personal blogger.” I still keep in touch with many of the bloggers who were around at that early time in blogging history, only now it’s mainly through Facebook.
In reading some of my old posts, I realize that I still write about the same things: politics, injustice, being a woman, ordinary magic, getting older, being me. Things change. Things stay the same.
My mother’s name was really Bronislawa, which doesn’t have an English equivalent. So they called her Blanche.
Her dementia took over all of our lives for the past decade. Now that she is gone, my mind has cleared enough to remember her as she was before.
She was born in America but spent 8 years in Poland with her mother and siblings between the World Wars, when she was a pre-teen. Her father stayed behind to keep earning money, and the rest of the family went to live on the family farm in Poland. She was bi-lingual. She was the oldest of three sisters. She never graduated from high school. She had two brothers. None of her siblings is alive.
This is her and her mother and sisters when they returned from Poland to live in Yonkers.
At the age of 16, she went to work in the Alexander Smith and Sons carpet factory. Her family struggled financially, so they all had jobs. She often recalled that her father had to wrap her arms with ace-type bandages because they would be so sore after a day of work. Until the day she died, she had an indentation in her right forefinger, which she said was caused by the thread she had to wind around her finger day after day.
She was always slim and petite. And pretty. Not beautiful or striking. Pretty. He was handsome. “All the girls were after him,” she often said, “but he picked me.”
This is her and my dad when they got engaged.
She also was a great social dancer and, of course, loved to polka. For many years she danced in a local Polish dance troupe. That’s her, on the left, and one of her best friends, who is still alive and who attended her funeral.
Even toward the end of her life, when she pretty much stopped speaking and walking, my mom would follow my lead in the fox trot and waltz if I held her close to me. She loved music. Loved to dance.
She also liked to sew. When I was a child, before every Christmas, all of my dolls would disappear for a day or two and then show up on Christmas Day all decked out in new dresses that my mother made for them. She liked her clothes to fit well, and she was always sewing them in, letting them out, hemming and correcting. I have that same tendency. She taught me to knit, crochet, and embroider, although she never really spent much time doing those things. Mostly, she was the full-time wife and mother and much-loved member of a group of Polish/American women who played Canasta once a week and socialized, family-style, other times.
I lost count of the visitors at her wake who said to me “She was a real lady.” Proper behavior and stylish clothes were important, and she bought the most fashionable shoes, which for many years had very pointy toes. She liked pumps and bought them narrow so that they would stay on her feet. Her toes suffered for that vanity, and when she got older, it was hard to find shoes that were comfortable.
She chose the suit and blouse that she wanted to be buried in more than a decade before the event — and with pearls around her neck and in her ears, she looked like a VIP, which, to many, she was.
Her portrait, for which she posed to have painted in the 1950s at my father’s request, still hangs in my brother’s house.
The front of our house, with its minimal stone stoop, faces south, so it’s the best place to sit and have a cup of tea in the morning or relax after dinner. In a few weeks it will have plants on and around it, but it’s still too cold to get the plants in. But we all sat out there in the sun for a while today — the only family in the neighborhood who stoop sits.
