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[4/17/21]

Writer's picture: Penny HarterPenny Harter

I haven’t written very much in recent weeks, perhaps because I’ve been able to go out more since being vaccinated. Also, I think I’ve gone a bit fallow after putting together the year’s worth of poems from my forthcoming collection Still-Water Days from Kelsay Books.


However, as we enter this 2nd pandemic spring, I notice that I feel even more nostalgia for days gone by, not just “how it used to be before Covid” but even for years gone by.

_____________________________________


Another Spring


Back in the ‘80s, after my parents moved from New Jersey to Texas, buying a lot next to my sister for their new double-wide ranch home, my parents still called two of their three bedrooms by my and my sister’s names.


soon to be scrap metal---

abandoned swing set


When my late husband Bill and I visited them, we slept in “Penny’s room” while my sister’s had become a storage room. In it I found an old photograph album open to a page that held my grandmother—a baby lying on a fur rug in front of a fireplace. Several years later when my sister and I were cleaning out our parents’ home, the album was missing. I still wonder where it went.


visiting the

lost-and-found bin

hoping to recover . . .


These days, it doesn’t take much for me to tear up, sometimes prompted by something random and unexpected, or by the sudden, brief visitation of a memory. Perhaps this year of isolation has caused my emotional vulnerability—this year of strange nighttime dreams, of time sliding into a stream of days, and of my growing empathy with all who have suffered illness and loss. Yet even so, I find something good to celebrate each day! We are resilient, and there is hope.


spring light rides

this morning’s wind—

high tide in the river


© 2021 Penny Harter

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