It seems like a long time ago that I was a young woman shepharding another young woman into the world, a mother to a daughter. Watching the changes that puberty brought — the rising and falling tide of hormones, the blossoming of fertility, the chance that another generation was going to unfold (which it so delightfully has), was profound. I wrote about it. No surprise, I write about much of what I experience.
Sunday David and I visited friends who live far north in New England, and it was winter there. It’s creeping closer to winter here, the thermometer reading a chilly 20 degrees yesterday morning. But driving through Franconia Notch two days ago it was snowing and snow squalls followed us all the way to our friends’ farm where the grass had a white crust and a trailing vine on the porch was laced with icicles. Ice, snow, a hard wind and a fire in the stove.
Put these together, and I think of another poem I wrote long ago, as I did last week. The resurrection of poems continues.
Valentine’s Eve
I hear ice in the trees.
Our footprints from before dinner
up the walk to the house,
have crusted.
The sky, thin as newspaper,
shredded white,
hides black ice underfoot.
Oblivious to ice’s season,
another seed falls through me,
and through my daughter now too.
My hand on her arm,
she stops to stand with me —
we listen to ice clack above us,
raise our eyes from the ground,
hearts beating hard
as startled birds abandoning cover.
Grace Mattern 