We planted gardens and waited for their yields
each day was just one adventure more.
Then it happened, the pages fell off the wall
and year by year, those numbers did fall

off that dusty calendar’s numbered pages.
I grew taller and I quickly grew older
as the world turned that much more colder
and her words started to fade within the ages.

We grew distant as I traveled on
though I wasn’t there, I was not gone
her memory was with me every day.
I’d call her sometimes on the phone

and we would often begin to roam
and remember to remember memories
"What about that time we had a flat-
we were broke and that was that

and strangers came to help us like the breeze"
"Then that time out on the grass
when 100 chickens came to pass
and met their farmly demise beneath our trees"

All these memories have changed my ways
From my early third grader days
it’s hard to tell the road that I would have traveled.
But now, age has turned to foe

and is erasing the elderly woman I’ve come to know
as a strong soul who could not be easily frazzled.
Though she may be frail and forgetful to you,
she’s a woman who has paid her due

and I’ll remember her for helping me learn to live.
Nursing home has settled her in its grasp
I fear that this step shall be the last
and I hope she’ll remember to remember me in Heaven

©August 13, 2003 Lori S. Maynard