The Sorrowful Mysteries

This is an old poem I wrote while my parents were alive, but given the world's current sorrowful state and d'Verse's tribute to Louise Gluck (recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize for literature) who was known for her insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death, I thought it an appropriate time to share.

My father and I say the rosary on the drive home

from the hospital.

I forget a line in the Our Father

and mumble my trespasses.

He finishes for me.

How could I forget

that which was memorized at the knee

of Sister Severe?

Swimming upstream in his wake,

I navigate the mysteries,

the joyful and the sorrowful mingling like water and salt—

Let it be known that no one who sought

thy intercession was left unaided.

He stumbles on the words,

they fall into his handkerchief.

I finish for him.

The miles pass unnoticed

and the mysteries come to an end

but the road continues and the day approaches

when there won’t be anyone left

to remember what is forgotten.

Vinegar and Newspaper

With the autumnal flocking of birds and rustling leaves whisking by my window, I try to wash one or two when the sun shows its fickle face. At least the ones I missed in spring with my scattershot approach. The window of opportunity is scant and fleeting (no pun intended). With a spray bottle of vinegar and water and several sections of newspaper—grandma’s mode of attack—I start. Drying with newspaper is how she did it, and the task always brings back memories of her. We’d be on the roof—one of my sisters or me—to wash the outside of the dormers, while grandma on the inside meticulously pointed out the spots we missed.

With grandma gone, I admit to the occasional bottle of store-bought window cleaner and a rag, but I always feel vaguely guilty about it, as if she were watching. For streak-free, squeaky-clean windows, vinegar and newspaper are not only cheaper than the dirt caught in the sills but will give you perfection beyond compare. 

Some things can only be done on a sunny day, but with a dearth of those, my flowerbeds are overgrown, the pear didn’t get trimmed, nor the strawberries weeded, and garlic is yet to be planted. What can be done on these dreary, rainy days?  Baking chocolate crinkles, walnut leek tarts, and canning pickled beets. Reading under a blanket and writing with laptop balanced on said lap as Hitchcockian flocks of birds fill the trees and flood the sky outside these freshly washed windows, for winter’s coming.