Cynthia M. Sheward
I was a daughter instead of a son.
I was a dreamer instead of a student.
I was a tom boy instead of a lady.
I am the last magnolia blossom high in the tree.
I am a lightning strike in a blizzard.
I am the dog who waits at his master's grave.
I find solace in spinning and knitting.
I find peace in gardens and greenhouses.
I find comfort in communities of friends.
I am God's imperfect child.
The cardiologist asks
“Does it hurt?”
“No” I say not knowing
how to describe the
weight and ache.
Veins and arteries branch
heavy and bark covered
from my core, like limbs.
My hands go numb when I drive.
My hips ache at night.
The dark center of my trunk
is warm and hollow
where a nightingale
sings on her nest.
iStock photo
Florida seasons baffle me.
Dead magnolia leaves litter the sidewalk
like tan leather mittens
while white patches of pusley
mimic snow on the grass.
Blue violet Speedwell
hides in the lawn like tiny pansies.
The neighbor's Mimosa tree blossoms.
It's odd to my northern mind
to see flowers in November.
Here in the subtropics,
I am perpetually lost in time.
It would be a shame if controllers went out on strike.
Is it a strike if they're not being paid?
It would be a shame if there was no one to guide
Air Force One back into the country when Trump
returns with his gold crown and Mugunghwa order.
It would be a shame if unpaid essential workers
took a vacation - walked away from security, law and order.
Do we understand essential? Who risks their lives for free?
It would be a shame if Americans decided their President
should stay home when the government is shut down,
if they realized this "Peace Maker's" first obligation is to them.
It would be a shame if we did not see that his promises
have been smoke and mirrors - food prices up, housing up
tariffs and bullying up. Hope down.
Seventy-seven Sunset Strip
Snap Snap
Seventy-seven is as new to me
as my first pregnancy.
Morning electrolytes prevent wobbling .
A plethora of drugs and minerals
protect me from moods and migraines.
Arthritis resculpts my hands.
My neck hates holding up my head.
Time takes its toll
but gives its gifts.
Limitations are not prognoses.
Deafness silences my world but
I can still hear the birds sing.
I'm grateful for the quiet.
Subtitles are simpler and silent.
I remember the oddest things
Seventy-seven Sunset Strip
Snap Snap*
* Theme song from 1958 tv show.
My father loved gardenias.
Easter I'd find one by my place at the table
to wear to church.
Their rich smell and leathery leaves
baffled me as a child.
Later I came to love them.
Gardenias bloom today outside my door.
Dad also loved chocolate.
Chocolate hearts and cards
graced our dinner table each Valentine's Day.
My sister found his giant chocolate bar
after he died.
Mom preferred savory things, sausages, cheeses,
the roses that lined our front walk.
Do fathers still give daughters corsages?
We are so casual now even at church.
(Jeans have their place but it's not everywhere.)
I adore men in summer suits.
Women in gossamer dresses.
Girls in smocked pinafores.
We've misplaced our elegance.
I saw a death’s head in the clouds
with gaping maw and vacant eyes
this morning as I walked my dog.
I gave up portends long ago
letting drink and daydreams go
to choose instead right here, right now.
But these clouds gave me pause.
Helene passed us headed north
slammed towns and hollows in the hills
displaced the gentle mountain folk.
A hundred people lost their lives
in flooding never seen before
the land I thought I knew so well
became a soaked and battered shell.
This earth no longer seems benign
when storm and fire and flood abound.
Volcanos spew and earthquakes shake
we stand no more on solid ground.
With plastic waste from shore to shore
man’s greed continues wanting more.
Despite earth’s message loud and clear
that she no longer wants us here.
My sweet girl.
I have watched you grow
blossom, sometimes struggle.
Who would wish adolescence
on anyone they love?
Like childbirth to life,
these years a
necessary albeit
challenging passage
into adulthood.
I remember Buddha you
straight from the womb.
Unafraid of toads you
In your Alexandria backyard.
Baking bagels you in my
Clinton kitchen.
Knitting you trying when
I visited to master the craft.
Teenage you behind your
bedroom door.
I wish you passion
for something to focus
your mind.
Mentors to speak
to as you grow.
Books to warm
and comfort you.
And the sure knowledge
of how much you are
loved.
The skin on the side of my left knee is soft as a baby’s butt. The rest of me is more like an old baseball mitt. I rub the spot on my knee when I’m stressed.
My earliest effort to comfort myself was years ago. I’d insert my left thumb into the opening of the satin edging on my blanket then place my right thumb in my mouth. In my mind the satin’s softness would travel up one arm and down the other into my mouth. (Don’t look for logic here!)
In junior high, I became a hair twirler. Round and round I’d twirl hair on my finger as I read or studied. The hair was soft and the twirling comforting.
At fifteen, my best friend and I took up smoking. We intercepted sample Waterford cigarettes sent to our parents, waited until Judy’s parents were out and coughed our way through our first attempt at sophistication. As we smoked and choked, we read aloud a book on quitting smoking . We laughed when the book talked about the challenge of giving up a favorite lighter or ashtray. (I still remember fondly the green glass blob of my favorite ashtay and my brass Zippo.) I smoked for five years, quit for ten then smoked for another ten. More addiction than comfort.
In 1965 my great aunt died. I stayed up all night before I went to her funeral. Exhaustion insulated me from the sorrow of losing one of my favorite family members. She was the last of our family to use Quaker plain speech. She’d Thee and Thou her way through jokes. She loved to laugh.
I started drinking in high school. Our friend would buy beer, and we’d ride around in his Chevy convertible listening to the Beach Boys. Sometimes we’d visit another friend’s house where his mother would serve us whiskey sours to keep us from drinking and driving. Yuck. Alcohol helped cut the agony of high school.
Reading has been a comfort my entire life. I read to satisfy my curiosity, travel vicariously, fill waiting room hours and to escape. The Harry Potter books helped me through hard years at work. Books by E. B. White, Henry Beston and John McPhee have carried me through other tight spaces. My therapist suggested once that I not read for a week. I refused. “You might as well commit me now!”
My current comfort (and battle) is eating goldfish while I read. I lost 25 pounds last winter but have been gaining them back one goldfish at a time. Blankets no longer have satin edging but perhaps I should take up thumb sucking again. Wish me luck!
Tall hedges surround the house.
The long grass has gone to seed.
Fading peonies hide among the weeds.
Only one wicker chair on the porch has a seat.
I knock on the door and wait.
No one answers though their car is in the drive.
I call Anthony on my cell.
“Cindy! Where are you?”
“I’m on your porch.”
“I’ll be right out.”
Time passes.
I sit on the chair and look at the fields
where sheep once roamed.
The chicken house too is still.
No chickens or peacocks strut its yard.
The air smells of country – grass, pines, sunshine.
Anthony opens the door, and we hug.
He is old, his curly hair gone grey and wild.
His smile wide. Julie sits in the kitchen
talking to herself. She smiles when I say hello
not knowing me or why I’m here.
Anthony makes us coffee from Wards in Newark,
a joy we share. He grew up there.
I’ve brought pignolis – cookies his mother
used to make at Christmas.
We chat and drink our coffee.
Julie stands by back door and looks out - still talking.
She brings something in from the hall to
place by her parents’ photos,
a shrine whose people she no longer knows.
Her eyes shine. She smiles.
Before I leave, Anthony shows me his tomato garden.
It’s perfect. Many plants. Orderly rows.
Fenced to avoid predators – his
escape from incontinence, locked cabinets
the constant vigilance that protects his wife.
He is her husband,
her jailor
her Prince.
Before imperfection
I sought life’s meaning
not knowing the rowing
was it, not the arrival.
Before I became ignorant
I told others what to do
believed I had answers
not knowing even the questions.
Before I became old
I found quiet boring
its slowness a flaw, not knowing
the rowing was all.
We ignore the bag we live in until it chastens us. Cut or burned, bruised or broken out, it becomes visible, heals like magic. In childhood it’s chicken pox, impetigo, measles. In high school it’s bouquets of pimples and ballooning fever blisters. Perfect skin is edible – who doesn’t desire to gobble a baby or study a youth’s perfection? At 20, I eat my way through Europe and acquire stretch marks. At forty, I notice a crack under my chin. A tiny person seems about to remove the scaffolding. At fifty, laugh lines become crevasses. At 73, I drool over nothing. At 75, the thin flesh of my hands is crinkled, ancient. I bruise without notice. Mapped by veins and arteries, this skin’s a phlebotomist’s delight. It cuts like butter. The chin under my chin resembles a whale’s, creased and ridged for expansion. Perhaps I’ll blow a bubble net and rise through the day eating words.
Aging is interesting. Like a first pregnancy, it takes us into unfamiliar terrain, prompts new perspectives and is tinged with both excitement and fear. Last week I had a cardiac calcium scan, where they look for calcium buildup to gauge the heart risk of high cholesterol.
I got a score of 200. Yikes! One website said I have the heart of a 78-year-old. (I’m 74.). Another site said a score of 200 indicated that, without some change, I would have a stroke or heart attack within the next three to five years. My doctor just said he wanted to start me on statins. Interesting…
Several years back a brain scan indicated that my brain was shrinking and had white matter.
Both scans put me deeply in touch with my mortality. The idea that my brain is shrinking was particularly disturbing. I’ve passed whatever apex I’ve aspired to and it’s all downhill from here! No one who knows me will be surprised.
I find the heart business comforting. My family has two natural paths out of this life – heart attack and cancer. At age eighty-two, my paternal grandfather had a heart attack while driving in Wilmington and came to a stop against a telephone pole. No one else was injured. My father was eighty-five when he got up one morning, poured orange juice for himself and mom, sat down in his chair and died. If the statins keep me around for ten more years, a heart attack sounds just fine.
Of course, none of this is known. At each doctor’s appointment, we work to continue in good health knowing that one day the other shoe will drop. It is not given to us to know the how or when. Scans only supply intimations.
When I shared the cardiac scan info with my son, he said, “Mom, you have the heart of a lion.”
How could I not adore this man!
Driving Route 73
in Knox County,
I could eat the air
gobble stands of balsam
nibble tidal wrack.
A pickup speeds toward me.
The seagull, busy with roadkill,
is slow to rise.
He smashes into the truck’s grill
and bounces, dead, across my roof.
Each day I see his body,
white and inert, at roadside.
So sudden the flight from life
to stillness at the road’s edge.
All my life, in addition to manager, teacher, dog walker, night librarian, cleaner of tiles, rocker of babies, folder of laundry, dish washer extraordinaire, I wanted to be a writer.
Women are rarely one thing. We can’t resist our innate talent for nesting, team building, nurturing, placing others before ourselves. This is our gift.
Our hearts are larger than we know. We learn this
by plumbing those depths in safety with women on similar treks.
Not only can we write, speak, laugh, cry, loose old bonds which keep us tied, but we find, after many drafts, the titles we long sought rest in our own hands.
Matter persists they say – not just the stain on your favorite sweater or the mole on your arm. Molecules themselves have endless lives in a material soap opera. This week one’s Christ, then Mozart then Charles Manson. That’s what they say. Descartes believed he thought hence he existed – something his laundress and wife doubted not his dirty socks evidence enough. Who would use his atoms next be thoughtful or obtuse a tree, a bird, a slug? I die therefore I live. We’re each on loan from earth’s library one size fits all pretty or dull, fast or slow joyful or sad. Cinderellas headed to the ball when the clock strikes twelve, we become someone else. Relentlessly frugal earth wastes nothing in its global recycling. So too must the light which animates us continue its journey becoming the sparkle in other eyes or the ache in another's heart.
Before a war we think we know exactly how the war will go. Accountants happily project raised GDP and its effect. Predict each country will adopt a free economy and co-opt democracy who’ll bloom just like a desert rose but that is never how it goes. During war the News Hour lists each soldier whose return is missed and the places they called home, a soldier’s life reduced to loam. No locals named, not friend nor foe who is who? How can we know? The war drags on, a swamp, a mire repeating tours, souls under fire. It’s forgotten once we start wars pay for nothing not a part of their pile of pain and loss yet we ignore the total cost. Lives, limbs and minds are left behind. We're told the same lies every time. The goals and actions are a fake leave ravaged landscape in their wake. Once home, our soldiers dream the war and wonder what it all was for.
How fine to dine on clouds and color!
Why can’t we eat clouds?
The tall white ones would be
vanilla like Turkish taffy. Grey
scudding clouds black as Necco
wafers. Snow clouds pure as rock candy
whose crystal splinters
melt on the tongue.
Green tornado clouds taste darkly
of Key West and Matcha tea.
Dawn’s pink clouds are gossamer, light
as cotton candy at the church fair.
Sunset cloud's tang colorful
and sweet as Life Savers.
How fine to dine on clouds and color!
A stranger stands ahead of me in line at the Post Office in a dusty black hat grey gauze hanging below its rim. Her neck, also dusty, is bent, the vertebrae like tiny peaks. An old black jacket hangs from her shoulders. As she stands in line, she tugs at the jacket to straighten it. Her worn black pants fall to just above the cast on her ankle. Gauze wraps that too. I am afraid to stand near her, hang back as the line moves forward. I cannot see her face but fear it may be ghastly. Her turn comes at the counter. I’m next. When I glance over, I recognize her. She is the gypsy I’ve seen here so often. Her dark penciled brows and bold rouged cheeks usually paired with dark skirts and tops. Today, hurt, she does not look herself. She leaves a suitcase by the door while she gets her mail. That task complete, she straightens her jacket, collects her suitcase and wheels it and her pain back into the world.
depositphotos_150954514_xl.jpegOctober 11, 2021
As I approach the river in the fog
a heron takes flight, dark winged angel.
“Good morning, Mom.” I say.
Since her death, I greet
each heron and feel blessed
by the sighting. Mom’s love
of nature saved my life.
When sun sparkles
on saltwater and I feel
the wash of waves,
Jamie, my summer brother, is near.
As teens, we surfed September breakers
then collapsed onto the sand
laughing always
laughing.
All my old boyfriends are
dead (except the one I live with.)
Maurie, lifted his 6’4”
frame into the boat like a wet otter,
his homely face offset by
a quick wit. His farm town
roots were exotic to this suburban girl.
He believed withdrawal would work.
Good thing we broke up.
John, a handsome bad boy,
drove his dad’s T-bird.
Had a wicked sense of humor.
His mother looked like Bloody Mary.
He was my first male obsession.
He rose at Jamie’s funeral
to hug me, share our grief
for old times, old backseats
old friends.
Ann died last year. Forty years
of friendship, knitting and laughter.
Each project and strange new style
prompts me to call her.
Each knitting success is hers.
In New Mexico, when Linda
decided to drive - Ann and I
jumped in the back seat.
I am still laughing.
When the tall stranger steps into my kitchen in his tux asks for coffee and brioche, I’ll slip up to my room don my gown, plait my hair curl with a favorite book in my reading chair. With wind brushing my skin soft music in the air, I won’t invite him in. But when his face appears, I’ll smile and say “Darling, I’ve been waiting here.”
A hundred questions
cross my mind
What was that song dad used to hum?
What college did my mom attend?
Where did Aunt Marge’s friend come from?
I failed to ask
or make a note
of many things
while they were here
just within reach
alive and near.
A hundred questions
cross my mind
About Dad’s mom
who died so young.
I’ve no idea what she died from.
My favorite stories too are gone
The battleship
for whom Dad played
Hail to the Queen
a serenade.
Salts stood attention at the rail
Dad asked them down to
drink and sail.
He went onboard to drink instead.
These questions come
at oddest times
Old photos with the names now gone
A tune, a food, a place, a song
I wonder and will wonder long.
Banker Bob wears suspenders and a bow tie is older than God rents rooms to the newly sober bridges no bullshit. Old school AA he brooks no whining insists newbies suit up and show up. Never loses sight of the disease that wants to kill us. He is just a man many years sober doing what we are taught saving lives. Don’t talk, listen. Don’t try, do. Walk the talk. Keep it simple. Help another alcoholic.
Abuse is subtle
Nothing friends see
I'm blamed for his mistakes
He credits my work to himself
Observes I'm “almost” thin enough
Implies small things lacking
If only I were smarter, prettier, quieter
He laughs when I fail
Photographs my clumsiness
Ignores my success
Mumbles under his breath
the whispered threat
“I’m getting angry.”
He pouts childlike when ignored
Hovers over me in arguments
Buries the kitchen table in papers
Resists clearing it even for parties.
Holds my arm tightly lest I leave
The Christmas tree he promises to take down
remains up until Easter.
His hatchet for cutting up chicken
for the dogs rests against the hoosier.
It gives me pause.
He harangues me while I book vacation.
I select the seats.
I'm in 13A
He’s in 32B.
Each night I wait.
I watch out the window.
I count cars
that appear on the road.
See their headlights grow
then dwindle as they
continue past on
two lanes heading north.
“If I count ten cars, he’ll come.”
“If I count twenty…”
I hope we will drive to the light
and talk and laugh
but he may not appear.
I sit at the window until
late, the night gone.
Disappointment’s my reward.
All evening
I'm held hostage to hope.
My job – suspense, submission.
His – choice and power.