3.20.09 | New addition to collection - Poetry. 1st draft, rev1 |
Dad walked to me while I was raking after a fresh mowing; it was August, warm, less than a month after I turned eight and we had arrived for our vacation. I was in a new pair of jeans, grass stains on my knees. The sky was blue, brilliant, not a single cloud. I watched as he walked closer. “You have to make a choice,” he said. I thought of the possibilities; The kind of candy should I get before we left for the movie! Do I want to stay the night at my new friend’s house? What kind of art supplies can I get? Drawing and painting and making pictures out of nothing; a very favorite thing! “I’m leaving now,” dad could have said. “Do you want to go?” It was Bean’s fault, really; calling the other woman, Mom. Why he would do such a thing, I do not know, but he was the brother, older, always looking out for us, making sure we were taken care of. He knew things I didn’t. I called her Mom, too, and then I didn’t. Then, I did. I didn’t. I did. And, I didn’t. And now, I had to make a choice; to call her one or the other, but not both. “You can’t call her by her name and then change your mind and call her Mom,” Dad told me, “You are hurting her feelings.” This was not the vacation you had told us about before we left and got on an airplane where I pushed the blue button with the white girl figure so nice ladies would bring us can after can of Gingerale. Instead, I had to fight to disown you; I thought you had done the same with me. You could no longer be my mom. She was. I chose it. It was August, warm, less than a month after my twenty-ninth birthday and I had arrived for your funeral. Days earlier, my other mother called. “Your mom,” she said, “had a heart attack and died.” I considered I caused your heart to break; a bit of magical thinking, I suppose, the way it was when I was young, making a new life and an old somehow easier to accept. You were no longer there; I could no longer dream of a day you would be. And so I sat in your trailer, looking through all of the letters and cards you kept through-out the years. I found one particular letter I had written, telling you of a new job, about the money I saved. One day, I wrote, I will send you a ticket and keep you in a hotel and we can be together because they won’t let me see you or help you. You must have felt the same as I or I the same as you, not only before you died, but for a very, very long time. I did not remember this letter, with numbers and dollar amounts scribbled in, telling you how much I had saved, how much I needed. I wrote, I love and miss you. It was a stark contrast to that which I fought so long and hard for – not to see you, but to forget. |