More Than Enough

Changes in the weather.
Changes in the light.

You work quietly. Snapping beans.
You slowly fill the metal bowl.
Just the slightest light through the window.

Work. No deadline. Joy
in the work itself. Remembrances
of your grandfather’s house far South
from this window you stare out of,

Absently snapping. The ends here.
The beans there. Dinner,
one bean at a time, without deadlines.
A bowl almost full. You are in no hurry.
Content in the memories, the history of generations

slowly filling you. Not a burden, not exactly.
something else. An accumulation,
a realization that you are simply another chapter,
one you still write, Each day. With each choice,
Rising from the end you felt once was inevitable,
restoration work, preparing new meals,

over the memory of old.
You snap one last bean. More than enough,
your life bountiful in the simplest of ways,
uncluttered as if the spider’s web of the past
have no power to hold, and have become,
as it always was,
simply art.

About this poem.

Inspirations for poems are rarely singular.

Going to Virginia (which I did last week) always leaves me reflective. I spent 54 years there before moving to Vermont. A lot of life lived. Some wonderful. Some tragic and painful. The last decade and a half has been a restoration project.

I used to snap beans with my grandmother, fresh from the garden. Every time I visit their house (My aunt lives there now.), that is one of a thousand memories that comes back.

The weather is kind of funny today. Bright. Dark. And back again. Like life.

What a blessed life I have had.

Tom