A Deep River Year - 2017

Today would have been my father's 97th birthday. My birthday is tomorrow. Over decades we celebrated these days side by side. I cherished his life, without which mine would not be. Sometimes I open my mouth and hear his voice, or catch a glimpse of him unexpectedly as I walk past a mirror quickly. I do not know exactly what of him is in me.


We were different in many ways, saw the world with different eyes. He carried memories of a humble childhood, formed by a Depression and a World War. He regretted lost dreams that he strived to give to us, his children. He was not fully home in a world of keypads and passwords, texts and electronic messages. But he took care of those he loved with calloused hands and a tongue clenched in his teeth when there was work to do. He loved to touch his grandchildren and hold them, and he often cried with joy. He grew roses by the hundreds, talked to them as he pruned and watered, picked them to give away abundantly as if love were just a thing that anyone could grow.


I remember him on a summer day, standing in his Iowa garden with the sun on his face, a fresh-picked tomato in his hand. He and I would eat them there together, juice running down on our chins and soaking into our white T-shirts. When birthdays end and forever comes, that would be the heaven I would seek, my father's smile and tomato juice on my face.


Birthdays


We mark our journeys
 by days and years,
 our lives marked by scars
 and shaped by songs
 we once sang together
 with the ones
 who went before us.
 Today I hear
 my father's voice,
 his laughter at the story
 whose ending
 he could not remember.
 I walk across the cold, March earth,
 seeking his footprints
 in the fallow garden soil,
 or among the wintered roses
 where his life's blood
 once ran in scarlet and pink,
 the blossoms that he gave away
 in love.
 But today, his birthday,
 there are no footprints out there.
 Instead, I find them
 in the secret place
 where memories never rest,
 but stir us to tears or joy
 or simple gratitude
 as I, too, complete another circle
 around our little star
 on this cosmic bit of dust and rock
 where roses bloom.