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
I love this poem, Karen, and I’m happy to see it posted here. You have such a gift.