Glenda, a widow for three years, says she misses

football sounds rolling through the house each weekend,

though she had fussed when her husband

wouldn’t turn it off. My new guy watches now.

I’m getting used to it again: the crowd’s low thunder

under commentator prattle. Sometimes I watch a bit

or bring my laptop to the couch, look up

when the noise swells or Chris swears. Sometimes I get tired

of that TV rumbling most of Sunday after rumbling

most of Saturday, but I remember Glenda. And I remember

 

my ex-husband’s snoring: I’d lie there telling myself

I’d miss it if he were gone, but sometimes I slept

in the other room. I remember Mother, who never spoke

of these things, hinting to me that she wished

she’d been more intimate with Father when she had the chance,

before the earthquake of his Parkinson’s. And farther back,

during my family’s three-week migration to Lake Huron,

I remember Mother mad at him for sticking to the radio’s static

as Ernie Harwell crackled the Detroit Tigers’ play-by-play.

My sisters and I picked at Daddy to swim with us again,

carry us again on his shoulders across the blue deep

to the sandbar—that clear strip of aqua—

where we’d splash, up to our knees in laughter.

Photo by Kent Landerholm