Fragments of My Mother

Today, my mother has forgotten how to write her name.
For this woman, an avid reader who trained me to love libraries, a business owner who put her signature to documents all her life, Alzheimer’s disease has destroyed that final link with written language.
Her writing skills have been deteriorating for quite a while. She couldn’t spell anymore. But even three weeks ago, she was able to sign a card to her sister. It seemed instinctive, her hand shaping and flowing through the many letters of her complicated last name. For 59 years she scrolled out that signature.
Today, her name was missing parts, whole segments had vanished, and it broke my heart.
Okay. We trudge on.

*****

I have missed my visits to friends in the blogging community. For a few days here, I’ve had to knuckle down and work on assignments. Met my deadline, though, yesterday.
There’s something succinct about my tendency to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done by tomorrow, and it’s written in the Alcoholics Anonymous guide to the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions:
“Consider, too, our talents for procrastination, which is really sloth in five syllables.”
I stand convicted of sloth.
But today all that is behind me, and I’m looking forward to a drive through the beautiful green countryside with a brother and my mother. The natural world in my neck of the woods flourishes with the generous rains after a three-year drought.
For some reason, a verse from the 23rd Psalm leaps into mind. “He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.”

*****

My next plan is a small-press competition called the “Poetry Project: Fragments from Sappho.”
Sappho was a timeless ancient Greek poet whose body of work includes numerous fragments of poems. Tupelo Press challenges poets to write a poem using one of 10 fragments as a first line or title.
I’m going to play around with a few. Here’s one, with a first line of a Sappho fragment:

YOUR DELICATE LAUGHTER SOARS

But I to you of a white goat sing
a tune more lusty than your sensibilities
You are too fine a goblet
to bear the peasant wine I pour
while dreaming of my shepherd

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