Things I Always Knew I Loved

 

I didn't know, in 1956, lying in the hammock
in my grandmother's back yard, how much I'd love
that small yellow cottage all the years of my life,
how I'd remember being wakened every morning
by the slap of water against the bedroom wall
as she watered everything down against
the heat of the day, the canvas awnings pulled down
like sleepy eyelids on the two front windows.
I didn't know how I would still smell, in memory,
her roses and sweet peas and pinks - how I would 
look for pinks to plant in every nursery 
in my elder years and never find them.

I always knew I love the sky, that arc of blue
I gaze at so many times a day: mornings,
when the world is new, afternoons, when the light
turns the trees to amber. I have always loved
sunsets, but am now too tired to get to many;
how they shine in memory. I always knew
that I loved rivers, walking Stamp Falls with Pup
so many afternoons. He would lie in the yard
up by the fence where he could keep watch.
When he heard me take the lid off my lipstick,
he would run to me barking, excited, frantic.
He knew I put my lipstick on before we went out.

I always knew I love forests. At twelve, I biked
far into the country, parked my bike, climbed 
the hot, pine needle-strewn slopes, redolent 
with sage and Ponderosa pine. I drank from
irrigation trestles, wet down my blouse to cool
myself, walked back down the soft needley slopes
singing, once followed by a herd of cows
who must have thought I was taking them
to the barn. Their eyes as I cycled away -
no barn, no hay. They dropped their heads
into the grass, resigned and chewing.

I didn't know, back then, how much
they'd come to mean - my mom and her siblings,
who were so beautiful and tragically unhappy,
struggling through their lives, yet
emerging through the front door of Grandma's cottage
in the home video, with big smiles -
impossibly sophisticated in my 12-year-old eyes.
Golden, now, in memory, old unhappiness
forgotten - only their smiles remaining.
Beloved.

Inspired by "Things I Didn't Know I Loved" by Nazim Hikmet. I have always been aware of what I do love - the beauty of the natural world. So I went more in that direction.