How We Learned to Swim
Thank you, Mom.
My mother was an English teacher.
When I showed her stories
she pointed out mistakes in punctuation.
“But did you like it?” I would ask,
wanting a big opinion,
to impress, not add a comma.
Of course, she’d say. A given.
She clipped dangling threads,
no critic but proofreader, by intention.
The big mistakes we mine to make.
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In truth her love of words shaped us
as surely as the handwritten letters in her elegant cursive.
In my childhood, a day did not pass without seeing her,
book in hand, or, later,
hearing her soft voice, reading
to her grandchildren,
piled like kittens on her lap.
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How I appreciate her islanding us in a quiet sea of words
one she swam in daily, and immersed us in from birth,
we have followed her soft voice, her daily routine, to the water’s edge,
safe, and sure enough to dive in.
So beautiful, as per usual, Laura!