Thelma T Reyna

I Stopped By Your House

  

...today, Dorothea, and parked my car next to your curb overgrown

with thistle and cockleburs. As far as I could see…decay and broken-

hearted garden beds, solitary and denuded in unforgiving heat and

missing you.

 

It’s been a year since you slipped by the peach tree in the back and

crawled for an hour to your door, thigh bone broken and bending and

sweat beading your forehead and fingers, mud caking your dress and

lips, neighbors deaf and blind as you crawled and hollered and hoped

help would come from the heavens.

 

At the hospital, your leg was made straight that night, and your

pastor sang optimism at your bedside, stroking your hands with holy

certitude. But 90 years have a way of giving up, not fighting the good

fight, and dissipating in a breath. And thus, as lightly as a candle’s

flame pinched shut, it was with you and death.

 

I walked your walkways in the height of noon today, and knelt by

your favorite bed, dianthus and vincas nodding their dessicated

heads, boughs entwined with one another for sustenance. Grasses

gray, apples mere bits of wood in branches anemic with neglect, once-

fertile soil lumped like stones beneath leaves curled and twisted from

thirst. Oh, how your gardens hurt!

 

In the darkness of your porch, I touched your soul: the wooden,

painted sign, Peace on Earth, your mantra in all your work, nailed

securely to the post, evoking you, and teas we drank in shade, and

your Quaker gentleness. I sat on concrete steps, in dust and webs,

eyes closed, and smelled bouquets you once arranged in crystal vases

by your door to brighten days of passersby and guests.

 

How lonely your house sits, windows cloudy and clapboard split,

curtains gone and decorations stripped. How starved the flowers,

petals faded, stems like stilts. Silence shrouds the front and rear, birds

evicted, butterflies departed, bees frightened away by loss. Yet but a

year, your joy was rooted in these.

 

I stopped by your house today, Dorothea, and grieved for nature you

once loved, that loved you back, as we loved you, and you loved us. I

stopped by your house and faced decay…but marveled at how

memories obliterate the here and now and take us back with such

resolve, to sights and sounds and smells and smiles and goodness and

amity and peace.

 

I marveled at how memories prevail when the love is strong.