We are still preparing the family home to sell. I have brought three loads of furniture, books, odds and ends from Virginia to Vermont over the past three months.

It is odd, seeing things that were always in my parents’ home in my home. There is both a sense of displacement, and a smile of warm memories. They are physical reminders of my mother’s death and my dad’s decline. But they are also a reminder of things they instilled in me – the love of old things, the love of the stories people and things often have, Every time I look at the old post office, or the odd Persian oil lamp that now lives in my dining room, their stories rise unbidden and I smile, and at times, also still cry as their stories flood me with emotion.

One of the strangest things for me have been my mother’s poems.

It seems my mother has collected more of my poems than I have. There are hand made books of poems I wrote as a child. There are scribbled poems on envelopes and scraps of paper. There are poems I sent her as parts of letters from college and grad school. There is a hand written book I did, and a bound copy of my grad school thesis, a collection of short stories and poems. There are print outs from my blog going back years.

And, there was one poem she wrote. Just one.

It was a sad thing, that poem. I will not print it here. Obviously it was intensely private. None of us knew she had written it. It was one of those finds that often come as you clear out an estate. Something unexpected.

The sadness was not unexpected. In the years since my divorce, my mother had become increasingly open with her frustration and sadness at the last years of her life, how some of her choices had caused her great pain, and kept her back from being all the things she wanted for herself.

Don’t get me wrong. She was an amazingly positive woman, right to the end. The people she touched and encouraged is awe inspiring. Four months later, I still get notes about the impact she had on peoples’ lives. She was an encourager, always an encourager.

But the sadness was there, and her one poem shows how deep it ran.

I wonder at her outlets for that emotion. How did she survive the emotions? I know she talked to my sister. I know she talked to me. But she also held so much in. She often praised me for my “courage” in writing and more than that, posting, my poems each day. “You hang your heart out there.” she would say, “Like laundry on the line, where everyone can see the color of your most intimate things.”.

We were not raised to do that. Feelings were not encouraged. At least not the expression of them. My father has never understood it. Ultimately he accepted it in me, but never understood what kind of madness makes me write and  publish. He believed, with all his heart, that it set me up for being bullied and put down. That feelings are meant to be kept to ourselves.

My Mother understood what I have learned, however.  That putting it out there is part of my sanity. It is how I figure things out, wrestling for the words that I often cannot find in discussions or in the midst of what is happening in my life. I have learned, there’s little special about my emotions and struggles and joys except that they are amazingly common. We are more alike that different. And so sharing them, for others who struggle with the words, gives them voice as well as me.

I look at the one poem my mother wrote and never shared. Not with any of us. It’s good. She was a good writer, a professional and a perfectionist in her wordcraft. But this she wrote and tucked away. Only to be found now.

I wish she had written more. We carry so much of her in our heart. But we have so little of her in writing. And for me at least, having more words would be powerful, especially if they were as heartfelt as this one poem.

I am grateful for this one poem however. I am grateful that she saved so many of mine – it is like discovering my own journey as a writer. Most of all, I a grateful for her encouragement, which floods back to me as I sort through and read this four inch stack of saved words. I smile. I cry. I smile.

In a way, I realize, all my poems are my mother’s poems. And the poems of every person who has touched my heart, in love and pain, or both. That whole stack of scribbled, typed and printed poetry? Hers. And maybe yours. More so than mine.

Be well. Travel wisely.

Tom

PS – the picture was taken of her in the sixties. I have a huge box of pictures to scan in, and this is the one that I scanned first. It’s how I remember her as a child, and I am feeling very child like as I wrote this.