Like a dandelion gone to seed
blown in by the breeze, Inga arrives
early and alone, slips in and out.
But her name is on the mind of all
who attend the 98th birthday party
for Phyllis. You’re almost as old as Inga.

Inga is the healthiest of us all,
says Joyce, who lost her hair
and a breast to cancer
and her husband to dementia
before her 90th birthday
just last spring, Inga drove
cross country alone to visit
grandkids in her nineties.

Phyllis rattles off everything
she’s lost in the past years,
appendix, ovary and fallopian
tube, two giant gallstones,
gallbladder, parathyroid,
two cataracts and a husband,
as she stretches swollen
and heavy log like legs
in her living room hospital bed.

Inga has outlived two husbands
and she’s still driving
and playing the guitar at jams.
Joyce laughs as she eats her chocolate cake
Two days later, Phyllis sends her son
with a birthday card to Inga’s house
just a ways down the road. Huge hearts 
decorate the posts and trees in Inga’s yard.
Since her car is gone, she’s at the church,
says Phyllis, celebrating her 101th birthday.
                        

says my husband as he shuffles
the deck at the kitchen table
and a gray rodent sleek as a greyhound
races across the kitchen tile
and dives under the refrigerator.

I saw him nibbling on the granola
wrapper she left on the counter,
pipes up my mother-in-law
as he skates across the carpet
and dives under the couch.

I can’t find one mouse trap
my husband says. Of course not,
I always kept a clean house,
she says as the mouse skates
up the hall on the linoleum.

My husband grabs a skillet
and races after him. Returns.
He escaped into a counter hole.
Don’t get blood on my clean towels,
she says. I look up home remedies
to get rid of mice on my laptop.

Cocoa powder. Red Pepper flakes.
Left cabinet, top shelf, she says.
It’s then I look at the door and see
the mouse scampering outside
and remember she’s been gone for months.