Goodbye

I dedicate this week's poem to my dear neighbor Ann who passed away this morning. She was light and goodness--more family than a neighbor. She taught me how to ride her horses, how to feed them carrots with my hand held out flat. She gave me my two lambs and didn't judge me when I named the first one Dood. When my family would go away on vacation she fed my cat, coming in the morning with her coffee and keeping Taffy company in the cold house. She painted a cat in a pumpkin costume on my very first trick-or-treat bag. She made everyone in my family an ornament--hand-painted or beaded--every year for Christmas. She and her husband spent a handful of Thanksgivings at our house. Whenever I locked myself out of my house, I had only to walk next door, ring the bell, and shake my head while making the motion of a door knob turning for her to open her hall cabinet and pull out our spare key. Just last week, when I told her I'd gotten a job, she said she couldn't be prouder. That was the last thing she ever said to me.

I loved her with all my heart, and in the twenty years I've known her I don't think I told her that once. A poem dedication hardly makes up for that--I don't know if she even liked poetry--but I've come to learn that every once in a while you need to steal someone else's words when you don't have your own, no matter what form they take. Sometimes that's okay.

So thank you, Ann, for making my life so safe and happy. I love you.  

Those Days 
Mary Oliver

When I think of her I think of the long summer days
   she lay in the sun, how she loved the sun, how we
      spread our blanket, and friends came, and

the dogs played, and then I would get restless and
   get up and go off to the woods
      and the fields, and the afternoon would

soften gradually and finally I would come
   home, through the long shadows, and into the house
      where she would be

my glorious welcoming, tan and hungry and ready to tell
   the hurtless gossips of the day and how I
      listened leisurely while I put

around the room flowers in jars of water--
   daisies, butter-and-eggs, and everlasting--
      until like our lives they trembled and shimmered
         everywhere.