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Remember: a poem a day keeps the doldrums away!

Mother's Noisy Kitchen
by
Gretchen Friel

Technically,

they may have been

weeds,

but the Queen Anne’s Lace

I brought you

made its way

to the dinner table.

“Magnificent!”

you exclaimed,

your voice spinning

in time with the

seasonless motion

of our summer kitchen.

“We need a bowl for

strawberries, girls . . .”

You bounced from

task to task with

gratifying ease,

“perhaps the fluted

pink glass . . . just about

the right size.”

Though semi-delegated,

the job of securing

a berry bowl

could never quite be

trusted to an eight-year-old,

so you moved in

to sprinkle white, rounded

teaspoons full of sugar

over the mess

I might have created.

Next, a mustard dish,

some salad forks,

clinking as we hauled them,

flowered cotton shirts

cupped skyward,

our skinny fingers

untrustworthy.

“Mamma, will you and Daddy

swim with us tonight?”

we chanted like

tireless bullfrogs,

no greater hope than

an evening dip.

And if the answer had to wait,

it may have been

because the mower

or the whipped cream beaters

interrupted,

making us languish,

as we knew we would,

until sunset.

Sometimes, we floated

in the cool, weightless

blue of childhood,

breathing only

when necessary.

“Marco.

Polo.

Marco.”

Sometimes,

we slept with

crickets on our window sills,

dreaming of our

mother’s noisy kitchen

all night long.

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A high school English teacher, Gretchen Friel has a Masters Degree in Secondary English from National-Louis University, and enjoys teaching creative writing as well as sponsoring the quilt club. She is passionate about her family, church, writing, quilting, playing soccer, creating scrapbooks, and trying out new recipes with something from the backyard harvest. Her husband, Shawn, is a gardener, Harley rider, and wood craftsman. A breast cancer survivor, Gretchen recently moved “getting published” up on her bucket list. Now that her first poetry book, Coffee Break for Quilters, is complete, she is working on her first young adult novel. Learn more at http://www.treedeckpublishing.com.

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