Old autumn sways inside her cool wool sky. Her branches cross. Fiddle like fingerprints circling their blessings. They know how to root a heart in place.
Through her eyes brown driftwood appear like two kind pieces, floating by, barely remembering their miles or the trunk which grew them.
But she is filled of old sweet bones, memories seeping like sugar maple sap: every quiet held sunrise, when she rocked sound back to sleep, year after year, against the softening cotton of her nightgown. Plumes of old familiar recipes lifted out with hot oven mittens around a family of hands: reaching, working, taking, giving back. Cupboard winters lined with glass garden rows in a dark cement basement. Every season - lengthening. Yet, every season - enough. Because she told them so.
Hope is always greater than loss. Life sounds like laughter and looks like prayer. This she reminded them, humming her wisdom. Dancing her mistakes.
Summer driveways beneath a dusk blanket. Awaiting the engine switch of life departing. Then another, then another. Her long porch listened deeply for a day's return. She knew the good ones always come back. And did they ever.
She laughed wildly, lived preciously. Made them each a life of matter with her bare knuckles and compassion. Tied so many shoestrings of love together that they buried themselves under her, came up breathlessly to try and love the same. When they couldn't, she loved them greater. So they would remember how.
They watched as her faith created patterns of circles inside their generations. Her smile was an everyday reminder that she did not live to prove it.
Her driftwood eyes float over and over, like seasons. October breezes scatter her across a thin riverbank. Still, her old sweet bones. They hold much more than her autumn expression. They have been carving her own way back. Into a thick trunk, to its deep roots. Into every changing leaf, falling. Into every last leaf to come.
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