for tony (via sid)
the week before was too hot and in the evenings we ate ice cream from donna’s anchor-hocking glass milk bowls; mint chocolate chip and buttered pecan. utterly unsuspecting as we moved cold sweet cream from the white of the bowl to the roof of our mouth. donna’s bowls, while solid and charming mostly go unused- they were given to us last year, just after her death at the age of 89. stacked four high, they cradle themselves behind the glass door of an heirloomed family treasure chest.
that same week before, the last of july, while vacuuming upstairs one afternoon, i found sarah’s crescent moon earring in a wrinkle of the carpet beneath our bed. i’d bought the tiny stud years ago in her honor and lost track of it not long after she died in early 2019. at the time i was grief-stricken but a part of me knew having loved her all those years that the earring would be back; that nothing real dies. even in a world full of missing talisman.
remembering tony now, gone three weeks and three days tomorrow i wonder if it wasn’t donna & sarah who came to pick him up- if somehow, in the spirit realm, they’d been given a sign of their own; a sort of advance notice that tony’s time here was almost up.
with death can come great recognition; reconciliation even but like the idea of a 55-degree day in summer vs. a 55-degree day in winter, my mind oscillates between ‘what’s the point?’ and ‘isn’t this all something..’ at the center of my vacillation is a sad & searing truth: we don’t take any of it with us when we go. not the yellow and red woven trivets hanging beside the kitchen sink. not the shelf of canned green beans planted proudly from seed and left to grow late into the summer. not even the photographs, my god the photographs..
about this poem
it’s been quiet here the last few weeks as my family has been moving through the unexpected death of my father-in-law, tony robert harmon on august 1st. there is so much i want to share with you here; my heart feels full and expanded having been able to spend a good chunk of time with our extended family at the family’s farm in nebraska as they worked together to settle tony’s estate & prepare the family’s land to be sold. both an ending and a beginning, this poem is the first in a series of writings i plan to share as i continue to experience and reflect on this sad & complicated loss. do you believe in signs? that spirit/god/the universe is always conversing with us? if you know me than i don’t have to tell you i do.. and how sometimes it can feel like without the signs (most often discovered in hindsight) this human experience would have swallowed me whole by now. thanks for being here & thanks for letting me share a bit of this journey with you ~ xo, s.
santos scribes 
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