She pushed the food around on her plate
strangled a smile,
"I don't know how to have fun."
my tight knotted mouth mirrors hers.
We ran wild, slamming screen doors
she carried stacks of books to the back bedroom
Warm Cans of Tab soda, cups of Ice, box of Aydes dietary candies,
the door locked,
lights dimmed
she crawled into the rumpled mess of bedding
my hyperbolic memory holds her there all day,
every day.
Everything she did outside of the bed was for someone else.
The cooking, the cleaning, the planning of events,
all for the church, the ailing neighbor, the friend's daughter's wedding,
Ironing his shirts, keeping his girls quiet, cooking his meals, washing his dishes.
following behind him, picking up scraps,
waiting,
waiting,
waiting.
my sisters and I swore we would never do the same.
We laugh at our broken promises between loads of laundry,
trips up the mountain
rolling our stones.
4 comments:
i guess some stones are so big we need angels...
oh my goodness, can i relate. my sisters and i laugh too and wonder if we should tell our mother the one thing she never wanted to hear too..."you're sounding like your mother..." We stop in our tracks because in many ways we have become ours.
beautiful...love the writing...
by the way...i am pretty certain that the picture is of a boulder that fell onto Topanga Canyon (or maybe Malibu) during a huge storm in 2000-03 ....wow.
Hmmm... I thought Malibu's specialty was major fires. Good cliffs for boulders, tho', landslides (post fire, of course), hanglider disasters maybe, stuff like that. We don't have any of that here in S. F. yet it's cheaper to live here. Screwy housing markets, huh?
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