. . . our December twenty-fourth dinners
with Alice’s jello salad and pineapple-coconut bars.
Rather than bowing our heads and saying grace,
we shared cards at the table.
One for my mother, dad and brother.
And theirs to me.
Raising our family,
the tradition continued.
Handwritten notes inside meant the most.
Some just covered with Xs and Os,
some with a memory from that year.
Always a personalized declaration of love.
Alice’s recipe is long forgotten.
But miles away, with children of their own,
our children still live the card tradition.
Now, almost in our octogenarian years,
we still smile knowingly on those nights
as we reach for the personalized card on our plate.
It’s NAPOWRIMO (National Poetry Writing Month) day 2! Today we’re asked to “write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.” Photo from an old photo album…note the writing at the bottom of the photo. Yep, that’s me with my brother (9 years older than me) and my mother.
lillian the home poet 