Est. 1962

My sister asked me to write about our childhood home as a way to celebrate the official fifty-year anniversary of our occupancy there. I didn't want to at first because it seemed too daunting a task. Then a writer friend of mine challenged me to write a poem or prayer using the word "let" as the very first word. I decided to join these two challenges and I came up with what I guess I'd call a prose poem. I am publishing it on my blog even though it has nothing to do with what I normally write about, but mom asked me to so...

Let me recall the grace of this house,

the beauty in every arch, crack, and creaky stair.

Let me close my eyes and see all the gathering times

of aunts, uncles, cousins, strangers, and angels we have entertained unawares,

and feel the spirits of those loved and cherished, even in their absence.

Let me look around each shadowy, jumbled closet in which I have hidden,

at the staircase where so many babies learned to ascend and descend in their need to conquer,

and behind each door where children’s voices still echo from fifty years of playing in hushed tones,

or counting in the night when we couldn’t sleep, from fights over clothes and pilfered albums,

and endless games where we each were winners in the end.

Let me stop and listen for the music of my mother, and the laughter of my father,

but also, the remonstrations and the soft crying and the apologies and finally,

the enveloping hugs which have made us who we are.

Let me carry in my heart the light that emanates from this house’s walls, windows, leaky faucets,

the small tables crowded with photographs, and the doors that never did close properly.

Let me gaze outside from windows propped open by fat books, at the trees we climbed,

and at the weeping willow under which old women once sat, watching over us and smiling,

with folded hands over ample stomachs.

And at the concrete steps from which I have observed each season, and shook my fist at too-fast cars,

and orchestrated my sisters’ sidewalk games; those same steps where

my brothers posed for pretty girls, and neighbors stood to pass the time.

Let me recall every sorrow and joy when, in some future time,

I am lonely for what was.