Solstice Memory
(c) 2025
Grandmother, your full-moon face
hovers above the trees, shines an opalescent light
across wild raspberries and leaves. This summer night
trembles. A light breeze slips through the screens
like breathless secrets the stars might believe.
In my dream, we are dancing. My small hands
grasp your fingers. You hum that tune
with no name. My bare feet
trace circles on cool linoleum. Your voice,
drizzling butter and brown sugar sauce
poured over bread, coaxes sweetness
from even the hardest mornings.
You guided my child-sized steps inside
the intertwined circles of our lives, of summers
steeped in humid afternoons. Sprawled
on ragged blankets beneath the silver maple tree
we told stories while shelling peas,
pitting cherries, or snapping string beans. Homegrown,
visceral memories expand and contract
through ages, all rolled in that steaming kitchen
where a pungent, heady foam of yeast swelled best
beside a bowl of flour and eggs, butter, sugar, and scalded milk.
I learned your words, your ways of kneading
dough with soft palms and strong arms. I grew
into your rhythms, the steady turns of each season
measured in laundry on the line, jams and jars
cooling on the counter, and silent prayers
while working. Weathered cotton remnants of your quilts
contain fragments of memories stitched from dresses
long outgrown, and hopes you dared to tuck beneath each seam.
When I wake, you will be on the other side of the sky again,
dancing in between stars, your hands
shaping the roll and rise of ocean tides. And I
will hear you singing in the calm retreats of memory
until I can hold your hands again.
20 July 2025
Notes:
In Native American thought/philosophy, the moon is Grandmother (so, Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon).
This is not an actual memory of time with either of my grandmothers. It is an amalgam of many, many memories (some with my maternal grandmother, but many of just being a kid in a small town in the summer).