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Chain of Memory

Six and ten and twenty and another ten, the years gather in groups rounding out to sixty,

then seventy, and we wonder and wander down chains of thoughts to the one about your mother

going to Majorca in a plane with a blindfolded Don Quixote,

drinking sixties’ cocktails on the hotel’s veranda.

I  always picture an 8 millimeter movie projector version, because that’s what she showed us,

 of happy smiling wives, on holiday.

 She talks of the trip. Your mother talks of the trip so often you forget you weren’t there,

 and she tells the joke of the blind Don Quixte as the Iberian Airlines’ logo, there

 on the tail of the plane that took her there, to the island of Majorca,

which you find out recently is really Mallorca, an island in the Mediterranean.

You thought it somewhere off the coast of Spain,  just off the coast in the Atlantic, not in the middle of an aqua colored sea.

The chain of thinking and thoughts roll down like leaking water on the metal links to a perch high above the swirling sea as a cliff driver swan sails out and over the rocks to dive straight into the waves at the base.

And all the 8 millimeter film crumbling in cans in the closet,

and the guilt at not being the curator of your past as you should be,

and lament and repent to not repeat the sin of forgetfulness in caring for your past

as those around say, stop looking in the past, only bring forth and forward those things you want in your future.

I want my mother's joy, and the black and white memory of the white two piece shorts outfit she wore with her sunglasses and martini on the veranda of that cliff hugging Majorcan hotel,

 her head clothed in a scarf against the wind and sun,

 tied under her chin like scarves are designed to be worn, not wrapped up like Rosie the Riveter or a heavy metal rocker tongue out and scaring the camera.

Cheers,

she clinks the stemmed glass to the camera and laughs.

Mustard and Teals

Oh, I don’t know,

Mustard and teal was never my thing,

                                                                             Until she brought the ivy in                                      

And placed it on the hall table and said,

We’ve arrived.

The branches of oak outside

Filled the foyer window as we peeled the paper

From the walls.

Layer and layer,

Peel by peel,

Until, we arrived, as she said,

Clinging to the lath and plaster

The last and original

Shred of

Yesteryear

In mustard and teal green.

It has to go, I said.

I know, she said.

But wait, and with watercolor and brush

Dug from the sewing room box

She reproduced it on the back

Of a housewarming greeting card

In Yellow Ochre and Vermillion Green

As I peeled the mite soaked paper

To its demise.

When all was done

She snapped a photo of our shaker style hallway

Fit for a contemporary architectural digest

Framed it with the wallpaper watercolor

Hung it on the wall

Near the window with the oak branches peering

Through the window of the hall watching,

The ivy on the entry table,

Sitting

That said,

They’ve arrived.

Deborah T. Johnson

December 2022