I Found My Mother's Poems After She Forgot She Wrote Them
The notebook in the hall closet was hers. She just didn't remember.
The notebook was spiral-bound and green, the kind that used to cost a dollar at the chemist. I found it behind a box of old photographs in the hall closet, the same closet she had been asking me to clean for a year.
I opened it because the first page had her handwriting, and I hadn't seen her handwriting in months. She doesn't write anymore. Her hands do other things now.
It was full of poems.
Not good poems. Not the kind that would win anything. They were about ordinary things, a neighbour's dog that barked too early, the way the light came through the kitchen window in March, a complaint about my father's snoring dressed up as a love poem. One of them was dated 1987, the year before I was born. She had written a poem about a house she was hoping to buy, and the house in the poem was the one I grew up in.
I sat on the closet floor and read all of them. Thirty-one pages. Thirty-one small poems about a life I had lived inside of without ever seeing it from the outside.
When I showed her the notebook that evening she held it like it was a stranger's. She turned the pages slowly, and I watched her face do the thing it does now when she is trying to find the memory and can't.
'Did I write this?' she asked.
I said she did. She read one of them out loud, the one about the dog, and she laughed at the right line, the same line that made me laugh on the closet floor. For a minute she was the woman who had written it, and then the page turned and she was holding a stranger's notebook again.
I put the notebook on her bedside table. Some nights she reads it. Some nights she doesn't. The poems are still hers. She just can't hold the memory of writing them, so I hold it for her.
She wrote about the dog. I write about her.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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