My elders wore housedresses 
with white anklets and sensible shoes,
occupied rockers or stood at stoves,
those women of the 1950’s relegated
to the perimeter of my playland before
vanishing to graveyards in their sixties.
At 66, despite my ability to still sit
cross-legged on the pier, zip blue
jeans, play croquet with the younger
generations, my niece’s husband drops

mention of my name from his roll call
line-up as we mallet our way across
the lawn. He focuses instead on his own
offspring whacking their way up the hill,
shepherding the youngest, separating
competing interests among daughters.
I thwack my ball through the last
remaining wickets, and like a leak
in a water tank, trickle away unnoticed

to the rear of the boathouse. Clustered 
there are those buxom elders in their 
checkered gingham, smirking gently,
waiting for me.
                        

you see that gangly black poodle
a neighbor sheared when you
were small, his hand passing over
the gleaming purplish body till it sat
bald and exposed. You didn’t know
dogs could look that ugly, and you 
had ventured to the far end
of the block to see it get shaven 
without letting your mother know.
Next the walking of San Francisco

into a museum featuring Andrew
Wyeth paintings; you were there 
with the boyfriend your mother wanted
you to ditch, never knowing you kept 
him in your life for years beyond high
school. Then comes the muffin paper

cupping peanut M&M’s at the first 
birthday party you got invited to attend, 
how they clacked against your teeth 
before you crunched the shellacked shell 
apart, your tongue’s own secret party.
This was before the birthday girl

bit you, clamped her teeth on your
upper arm and sunk them in, an infraction
her mother begged you to keep from 
your own mother, your sleeve long
enough to hide this trespass.

And here you sit as she takes her last
surges of breath, just as she was there for you
when you took your first, the only person–
despite all you kept from her–to know you
like no one else ever will.
                        

You don’t marry the man;
you marry the family

sounded as clammy as the weight of wet 
bedsheets, cumbersome, confining,
chilling as sleet. Yet before the wedding,

I came to learn that holidays happened
with all generations, homemade rhubarb
cobbler and lemonade; any whiff of a sister’s 
budding romance earned teasing and sly 
interrogations; that publications, promotions 
and other achievements met a groundswell
of applause. 
There were the old stories from childhood–
the peaches in crates under bunkbeds
at the cottage; sisters in fisticuffs over
“borrowed” dresses; that their mother
strained Coke through a handkerchief
when the glass thermos broke at the movies.
Stories recapped so many times till it seemed

I had been there and lived them myself, 
like I, too, had grown up in their Wisconsin 
farm town, not my suburb on Lake Michigan. 
Or that I swung on two playgrounds that day 
Kennedy got shot and died on camera; Trick 
or Treated both Union and Wesley streets; 
played Spud under double the streetlights.
And in decade #4 knotted tight as his wife

I’m well-versed in the dip of the gossip
bucket, feel pride in the skills of athletic
grand-nieces, confide freely in brothers-in-law.
For what once sounded like a Doomsday 
warning turned out not to be treacherous

at all, those bedsheets woven with merino 
and silk, sun-washed on clotheslines, 
scented with cedar.