Your life stretched like the South Dakota plains
as you rode with your circuit preacher husband
through a shifting horizon.
When I knew you in your unpainted shack,
Grandpa was dead. Four of your seven children
lay beside him.
You were old and almost blind. I was ten.

I came to your house every day,
unraveled the strands of your long life.
On the threadbare rug in front of you,
I wrote your stories down, asked questions,
saw myself
as a writer.
When you tired you’d ask me to play the piano.
Untuned, with missing keys, it sounded awful
to my ear, but glorious to you.
              Keep playing, you’d say,
so we struck a bargain: you’d continue to sift
through the past, and I’d bring music.

Sometimes, I’d come earlier to watch you
make sugar cookies, wondered how you could
bake without sight.
You taught me to see with my hands. If
the texture felt thin, it needed flour, too thick,
it needed milk. When the dough was ready
to shape you said to me
              Close your eyes. Let the dough sing to you.

You taught me how heat has different
smells as it rises. I learned to sense when the oven
was hot enough, when the cookies were done.
I was afraid to take them from the oven but you
knew your hot pads and trays, the magic
of not getting burned.


From gathering the harvest (Bellowing Ark Press, 2012).
Used here with permission

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