Daddy would say “Put your boots on,
that warm coat and mittens. You will need
them today.” Out we’d go, a pack of two,

with Daddy as the den leader, teaching me
to think like a hungry bird or raccoon,
to find water from a downhill slope,

to know where a vixen might dig her shelter,
name recent travelers from their tracks and know
if they were dragging dinner home.

His voice was bird-call and fox-bark,
angry goose and jumping fish.
Daddy had mastered them all, only

to teach the joys of stalking wildlife
to his only child–a daughter.
I have not wasted his legacy.
                        

	for Susan, my half-sister

When I was a child I knew
you were out there somewhere,
living with a father who was not mine
and a mother who was not yours.

When I was a child I saw a duckling struggling
to climb over a curb, its mother waddling on
with a large brood, quacking so loudly
that I thought she could not hear the one
lost duckling’s desperate peeping.

My dad stopped the car, slowly approached
the tiny scared creature, and gently, making a V
with palms facing outward, gave the little fella
a boost, just far enough so that his own hustling
got him high enough to scramble to his mother.

When you were a child, I hope
the father you had instead of mine
gave you moments like that, when you
knew him as strong and kind and wise.
                        

I grimaced for the first fifteen minutes,
not having had a professional pedicure
since long before my husband died,
probably fifteen years ago now.

I soaked, she snipped, clipped,
filed and buffed for an hour!
Then she asked what color,
to which I had given no thought.

Finally I chose a deep dark red
and sat back to let her paint.
Looking down when the first foot
had received its first coat, I gasped.

Laughing, I lightly told the attendant
that I felt as though, in that moment,
I looked upon my mother’s toes,
somehow living on the end of my leg!

A visceral, soul-filling memory
stretched me back to a salon in 1965,
watching as my mother’s toes were
scrubbed, buffed and painted this exact shade.

How could I know I would meet her again,
eighteen years after she died,
laughing with me as I have a pedicure?