#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
It was a day framed by writing groups: morning, in person, late afternoon, online, and before that a walk in the wet woods where the river and brooks are high and overflowing. I was very quiet, and listened. It’s the anniversary of my mother’s death, eleven years ago, so I was remembering that day and all of us saying goodbye in the nursing home where she died. My brothers and sisters and I texted each other this morning, to miss her together. I keep this picture on a shelf in my room, a copy of her college graduation picture. I thought about lilacs that will be blooming soon, and the poem I wrote and published in 2014.
The Color of Her Eyes
These lilacs, he says, are the color of her eyes
the day we wed, the color of her eyes the day
she died. They grew from a shoot she cut
from a root in the yard of the house she left
after wishing to marry me. We married in May
when I wished to do the right thing and her
mother – the priest – wished I’d keep my
promise to raise Catholics. The yard of the
house we bought was dirt. We seeded grass,
planted lilac, raised that child, then two and
more until there were five and none of them
were Catholic. These lilacs grew in the yard
of this house we kept for fifty years. In April
she died. The lilacs were late but her eyes
bloomed. I sat beside her bed that wasn’t ours.
She opened her eyes and I smiled. She held my
hand. In the end and the beginning your hands hold.
In between you waste all your chances to let go.
She looked at me. We must have remembered
something like love, and then she closed her eyes
and I was gone. The house is yours now and the yard
©Kelly DuMar First published in Corium, 2014; The Tower, 2015 and in “All These Cures,” 2014
