My Mother's Colors

Once proud, tall, imperious at the end she was

Stooped and round shouldered

A widow’s hump

Neck permanently stretched outward and down

If you want to meet her eyes

You must bend your knees a bit and look up

Even though you are taller

She knew a thing for an instant

Then it melted away without her noticing

Time, geography, people, places, things were fluid

She traveled back from here to there

From time to time

People morphed one into another; time shifted; geography traveled

She asked me what date my brother was born

Me! Who was not there, but she surely was!

What savage aberration was that stole that precious date her first born’s birthday?

Her darling red-haired Ballard boy?

Born and raised in Iowa she lived the second half of life in Hawaii

She knew snow bitter cold as well as she knew a sultry tropical breeze

Fields of Iowa green corn and lurid azure of the Pacific

“Corn should be knee-high by the Fourth of July” she always said

For her, there will always be turquoise, indigo and an Iowa green that revives the soul

I carry her colors onward through the years because she cannot.