Written for and read at my mothers passing.

Artifacts of a  Loving Heart

She hung the things of living life on her walls.

Things held in someones hands once.

Wooden spoons,

Wire potato mashers.

An old wooden level and the like.

Loving legacies of the small times,

Times unremarkable accept in their

 Irretrievable passing.

Moments of the heart were gathered on her walls.

Postcards and Christmas greetings from times not yet forgotten.

Loving laughter from the dead and gone.

In crowded drawers filled with watch fobs and pocket knives

The kinfolk gathered to fuss, to fight, to love and live their lives.

All in the most gentle care,

Of old Margaret’s memory.

She kept the bits and pieces, the disposable things,

So close to life and the living of life.

In an old tobacco can, amid the nuts and bolts,

was a bit of petrified wood.

“Oh yes!” “That’s Leon’s rock. He was a rock hound you know.”

…”I don’t know why I kept it all this time.”

Then the tilt of her head said

She was seeing her man again.

He still comes to her in dreams she said.

And sometimes she would be weepy off and on all day long.

She didn’t know why…she said.

She lost her mother when she was nine.

She lost her father when they sent her away back then.

She lost her Leon too soon. And too late for her

To start again. She just wasn’t built that way.

Always leaving it seems.

Like a child torn from the home into a world uncaring.

Little Margaret Delores taook what she could.

Things that a child might love,

Little things, just

Artifacts of a Loving heart