broken china

     I save the China my mother loved. Older women easily recognize the Johnstone rose pattern. I even save the dishes when they break. I remember when my mother got into redecorating our small dining room on Fabian Place in Newark.  She never did anything like this before.  She picked out a showy, striped shade in the kitchen; a nifty pull down lamp over the table and Johnstone roses that felt like spring. Our life wasn’t set on a course of middle class stability. The year before my mother died, I learned that my bookie father had been having a 20-year long relationship with another woman.  I even met her when I was a kid.  I think. This woman, had a basement like Filenes in Boston but full of hot goods.  My father bought a mink stole home for my mother from there and had a new lining put in it to hide the fact that the stole was stolen.

            Someone said that when my father was dying, some woman would come to the entrance to his hospital ward room and just stare at him from the doorway.  I wonder if that was true.

            I remember going back to my mother’s hospital room once and telling her the news I had just heard of this horrible earthquake in China. I thought I was telling her to distract her from her own problems; and to keep things real, maybe more balanced. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to share the news of the world when she was so ill.  Mostly, we shared a simple intimacy and I was just there to be with her.  She was upset for the people affected by the earthquake.  And I was moved by her compassion.  Sometimes, I think I’ll make a spiral mosaic walkway out of my mother’s broken China leading up to my front porch.

the wild blue poem series, from the first section on grief. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O