Uneven Grass
After chemo you no longer
needed to shave your thin,
hairless legs. The wind
chilled you: Lora helped
you pull on her son’s
long, red soccer socks.
All of us gathered
together in the backyard,
drinking lemonade. We
gave you the best lawn
chair, swaddled you in
blankets. Your face was
gaunt, ankles and belly
swollen as if in a
macabre pregnancy. You
hadn’t driven since last
autumn: Maria gave you
a ride here, Maria in
her second trimester,
glowing. The birds, the
green leaves: eight women
eating cake, trying to
anchor our flimsy lawn
chairs in uneven grass.
On the Fritz
"We must be committed to living responsibly . . . . The process takes as long as it takes to raise children who know how to survive on less." --More-with-Less Cookbook[1]
Don't change out
the fridge until it
dies during a mid-summer
heat wave. Before replacing,
consult Consumer Reports
at the library.
Meanwhile, make meals
determined by
expiration dates. Let Dad
finish off last week's
Quick Soybean Soup.[2]
Buy toasters at garage sales
so old they're triangular and
toast one side at a time, or
malfunction so you
have to turn the knob to
"dark" to get bread down and
"light" to get it up.
Use the failing blender
even though it sticks on
frozen strawberries and
your shake has chunks.
It's a wonder that
blender didn't kill me
the day it shorted out,
its cord a makeshift
Fourth-of-July sparkler.
Diamond Engagement Ring
One Sunday Great-grandpa Yoder threw
his gold watch chain out of the buggy
into the ditch. He kept the watch but
replaced its gold casing with silver.[3]
"A trifle, an ornament" said Great-grandpa of
his daughter's high school class pin,
though he defended her right to wear
snug stocking caps instead of drafty bonnets.[4]
“A small pebble” said Aunt Phyllis of
Mom’s diamond engagement ring, maybe
agreeing with Great-grandpa, or maybe jealous
since Phyllis got a sewing machine instead.
Or perhaps she wished that some female relative,
for once, would own a gaudy gold ring, the boulder
inconvenient in its corpulence, shimmering
proudly in the sunlight, defying tradition.
Dutchy English (a poem for Grandma)
You understood that some words
couldn’t quite be translated,
that it was all right to let those
stubborn Dutch words rutsch in
and verdutz the pure English
your generation prized. I remember
how you’d red up the house and
invite us over, and when the schnitz
pie was all at least there was bean
soup left. And you weren’t being doppig
when you put your pie in your soup,
you liked it that way, together.
[1] Longacre, Doris Janzen.More-with-Less Cookbook. Scottdale, PA: Herald P, 1976. 23.
[2] Ibid., 211.
[3] Yoder, Paton, (Silvanus and Susie Yoder. Goshen, IN: P. Yoder, 1982), 53.
[4] Ibid.