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