Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Disasters, Delights and Other Detours - 24. Haibun from Home
I have spent the last week emptying my mother’s house, where she lived for thirty happy years, and where I spent some of the best days I shall ever recall. It is now a chaotic landscape, full of boxes and tagged furniture ready for shipment to distant relatives, or to my own home. Yet even though the house be empty, the memories will remain. There will be a new owner soon, and I hope he will make this place as lovely a spot as it was for me.
I leave you
laughter in the garden
and winter warmth by the cast iron stove;
I leave you hot summer nights dreaming of unborn
kisses from unreachable lovers;
and October gossip
as leaves turn.
I leave you
afternoons of Scrabble
while rain pelts down on the old tin roof;
I leave you two hundred years of town history,
the first tin bathtub in the village;
and stacks of books from the
library.
I leave you
bright green early mornings
full of busy light which makes its plans
for afternoons spent on hikes and picnic lunches,
and crisp orange September evenings
singing songs of those we
always loved.
The old house is beautiful in the morning sun. The flowers are about to burst. The new buyer is most fortunate.
Classic lines
in quaint Greek Revival
gleam white and green in the late May dawn;
old irises reach skyward to catch each bright ray
and pink pregnant peonies prepare
to bow gracefully down
for sunrise.
The house is a battlefield, stripped and unrecognizable. Mom’s favorite reclining chair is gone, donated to someone with arthritis easily as painful as hers. Where is her furniture, chosen with joy and care, and imbued with her smile? It is divided amongst her children now, and I possess at least a share of it.
At dusk
I sit alone
with three old Shaker chairs:
mismatched, straight backed and rush bottomed,
somber;
with me,
they mourn a life’s dissolution,
bright joys and keen interest
made indifferent
by time.
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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