Meaning, Scribbled

My mother will be 94 next month. In Fall 2019, we flew her by medical transport from our hometown in rural Georgia, where our family had lived since the Revolutionary War, to Washington, D.C. An ambulance delivered her to a senior-living facility in a nearby suburb. Her home for the past six years has been Room 303. Early on, she left that room once or twice for medical reasons. Otherwise, not at all. Not even to the common areas on the second floor.

The painful irony is that more than anyone you’ve ever met in your life, home has meant everything to our mother. She lived for 55 years in our childhood home amid antique furniture, each piece of which had its own story; sepia photographs from every branch and twig of the family tree; miscellaneous memorabilia, e.g., a 125-year-old locket of hair, a telegram from 1944, a Civil War sword; and a lifetime of journal entries recording not so much what happened in her life but how she felt about what happened.

One of my themes here on Substack has been about home: how fortunate people are who have a home, what makes a house a home, and so on. If I seem to have insisted upon it, now you know why. It’s in my blood, so to speak. Not that this subject of home is all sweetness and light, not that it’s a Norman Rockwell painting.

I’m not a regular reader of poetry, but if I find myself thinking about a complicated, even fraught topic, I sometimes turn to it. Here’s a lovely poem that tries to say something true about families and the homes we make for ourselves. Maybe you’ll enjoy the way Salter transforms her childhood home into a poem, written in a language that only she and her family can read (“lines of aluminum siding are scribbled on with meaning / only for us who lived there”).

Home Movies: A Sort of Ode

By Mary Jo Salter

Because it hadn't seemed enough,
after a while, to catalogue
more Christmases, the three-layer cakes
ablaze with birthday candles, the blizzard
Billy took a shovel to,
Phil's lawnmower tour of the yard,
the tree forts, the shoot-'em-ups
between the boys in new string ties
and cowboy hats and holsters,
or Mother sticking a bow as big
as Mouseketeer ears in my hair,
my father sometimes turned the gaze
of his camera to subjects more
artistic or universal:
long closeups of a rose's face;
a real-time sunset (nearly an hour);
what surely were some brilliant autumn
leaves before their colors faded
to dry beige on the aging film;
a great deal of pacing, at the zoo,
by polar bears and tigers caged,
he seemed to say, like him.
What happened between him and her
is another story. And just as well
we have no movie of it, only
some unforgiving scowls she gave
through terrifying, ticking silence
when he must have asked her (no
sound track) for a smile.
Still, what I keep yearning for
isn't those generic cherry
blossoms at their peak, or the brave
daffodil after a snowfall,
it's the re-run surprise
of the unshuttered, prefab blanks
of windows at the back of the house,
and how the lines of aluminum
siding are scribbled on with meaning
only for us who lived there;
it's the pair of elephant bookends
I'd forgotten, with the upraised trunks
like handles, and the books they meant
to carry in one block to a future
that scattered all of us.
And look: it's the stoneware mixing bowl
figured with hand-holding dancers
handed down so many years
ago to my own kitchen, still
valueless, unbroken. Here
she's happy, teaching us to dye
the Easter eggs in it, a Grecian
urn of sorts near which—a foster
child of silence and slow time
myself—I smile because she does
and patiently await my turn.