Published on: 7/15/2010
Spring Cleaning in Winter

I help her throw away two-year-old sour cream,
the nearly empty cleaning products, two, three,
no, six bottles under the sink,
congealed drippings, scent of pine
and winter evening rain. Unopened
mail, paper clips, rubber bands; places to sit
dwindled among jackets, throw bags, outdated
coupons, a small unused photo album.
I step over cat toys, divvy out items
into various rooms, close
her bathroom door for another day.
This is not the first door I have closed,
there have been many --
the musty smell of youth
seeps through the cracks;
dirt and grime from skinned
knees on my bike, the wind I would ride
down the hill, a freedom
I wouldn't know what to do with,
what it meant. I close doors
to preserve, to know I can,
to know doors exist, that transition happens,
that it will happen to me.
I look at the bathroom door --
to me it is a portal, the only
place where I feel the tactile presence
of my body, the softening curves in my hips,
the marks where my son grew inside me.
I trace my calves and thighs,
the rough dry skin, the years of track,
of running in the dark, of becoming a woman.
I have no need to cover
the perishing of my body.
I open the bathroom door again,
look in the mirror as I did
fifteen years ago and reveal myself
through the pandemonium.
And this is where I want to be,
this place of knowing middle
age, not a thing of the future,
not a happening to someone else.
I see her through the doorway,
in the other room, the matted hair,
the bathrobe, the way she stuffs mail
in the over-stuffed holder;
I see her mornings in the piles
of towels on the linoleum.
It's what we do, watch a loved one
live in the luggage of their sadness.
I put another pill bottle in a basket
and close the door.