My mother is cleaning out closets.
Odd little gifts appear in the mail:
A bell-shaped ornament, a troll doll,
Coasters with ducks on the wing.
I asked for the ornament—
Cotton batting inside a fragile blue shell—
She sent exactly the one.
The troll was part of my teenaged collection, and
The duck coasters...are nesting in my closet now.
Mother is tossing away yearbooks,
Clearing old photos, and
Preparing to meet 80
Unfettered, independent, able to
Manage her life and a small
Apartment that simply will not hold
The two truckloads of Christmas
Decorations she sent away.
She is saving me work, time, and pain,
This I know,
Yet the moment is tinged with
An odd grief, a pre-grief, a relief,
The knowledge that I will not go
Home again and that my days of
Calling for comfort, praise, and recognition
Are shifting, escaping, and
I must break trail now, nearly alone.
Sally Goade is an Associate Professor of English at Russell Sage College for Women in Troy, New York. Her research area is women's popular romance, and she is currently editing a collection of essays, entitled Empowerment Versus Oppression: 21st Century Views of Popular Romance Novels, for Cambridge Scholars Press. Her individual book, Negotiating With Romance: Authors Transforming the Genre, also for Cambridge, is due out in 2007. Her poetry has been published in Roofbeam Magazine ("Victim" and "Runaway," 1998) and in campus literary magazines.
