my grandmother's house
elizabeth harris
Nested in this room,
healing from life's perfect storm,
I watched the winter come and go.
I've seen the leaves of the maple
outside the north window
turn the colors of the season
and fall to blanket the garden,
watched the fruit of the rowan tree
sunset-red and thickly clustered,
feed the birds through
December's long and icy days.
As a child I climbed these trees,
wandered these halls, slept in this bed
here, in my grandmother's house.
Rooms so familiar, named for those
raised here, stand quietly now
as a testimony to sixty years
of one family's life, in a house
where two were born and six were buried.
The creak at the top of the stairs,
the chime of the living room clock,
the distant sound of church bells,
form a mosaic of meaning to
those who know this place.
Each window holds a memory
of trees bending in the wind,
dancing to the sound of the Lake
as She sings her presence
under the summer sky.
The white picket fence next door
looks the same as it did
forty-five years ago
to this little girl sitting in the apple tree
with a salt shaker and a lap
of green apples, tomorrow's bellyache.
I pulled the last root of that old tree
from the garden I made
this spring with my cousin,
the one who loves plants.
We gathered phlox and veronica
from abandoned plots, far and wide,
left by old women whose backs
no longer bend, who now play cards
and eat pudding in the long-term care unit.
Tilling and raking we planted a celebration
of their lives, a small tribute to having
fought the good fight. They are
on their way to becoming ancestors,
living forward and providing beauty
to all those who stop to smell the flowers.
It's odd and so very precious
how, in this frenetic pace of life,
on the brink of the third millennium,
the sound of the back porch door,
or the fragrance of Gilead's Balm
riding the young summer breeze,
can bring up the rear of a long parade
where the Continuous and the Finite
march side by side to the music
of heaven, the drumbeat of earth.
Last night four granddaughters gathered
to honor the woman who made this home.
Each knows every inch of it—
the sounds, the smells, the taste
of the water from the backwards faucet—
and we've each taken our turn
adding and subtracting from this story
as our parents did before us.
We share our memories, we laugh and cry;
in the end, we extinguish the candles
with full and tender hearts, and
with small tokens of gratitude,
we step out into our lives.
Up here, in this room that cradled me,
soothed me, epiphanized me—
one by one, I put my things in boxes.
The wind blows through the leaves
of that maple, just outside my window,
and once again it begins to shed its leaves.
I take the lesson to heart.
This is the place where the past,
the present and the future converge.
I am doing…I am undoing.
I am preparing to leave
my grandmother's house.
about the author
Elizabeth Harris was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. When she was eight years old, her family moved to a small town on the shore of Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In 1964, she moved to Hawaii and two years later to California. She settled in San Francisco for several years before relocating to Seattle.
In 1971, after quitting her corporate job, she moved to a tiny cabin on 250 acres of land on the Olympic Peninsula. There she wildcrafted herbs and, inspired by Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, devoted herself to living a ‘natural’ life. Her love of nature eventually took her to rural Alaska where she and her husband lived with their two sons and a variety of animals, both wild and domestic. After eight years, she returned to Washington state as a single mother, settled in Bellingham and enrolled at Fairhaven College, graduating with a degree in Social Psychology. Following a 9 year career in non-profit management, she opened her own business and currently works from home writing for businesses and individuals. She has published one book, Bonedance, and is currently working on a second book, With Soft Eyes.
“I've been composing poetry since I was a child. The human experience is awash in exquisite moments, each of them with their story. As a poet, I notice the moments and seek to express my perceptions of them as purely as possible. I shape words to create a sensory landscape that evokes emotion in the reader. I believe that emotions have their own intelligence; they alert us to our own true nature, which is the perfect Muse.”
Elizabeth's poetry can be found at www.poetscove.org
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