October is, among other things, Alzheimer's awareness month. It's also my birthday month, and this year I am turning 70. By the time she was 75, my mother already showed signs of Alzheimer's.
With this poem, I tried to capture, in a short and simple scene, and with the use of repetition, that moment when I first realized that something was wrong.
Mom was a fabulous knitter who made the prettiest baby sweaters for the Christ Church holiday fair every year. Although she was born in New Jersey, Mom spent much of her childhood living in England, and her mother was Veddy, Veddy British. So four o'clock tea time was a daily ritual.
Tea Time
Your knitting
needles quiver
like hummingbirds
with woolly
yarn for wings
Shall we have tea?
I listen for the
teapot’s whistle
from the kitchen,
but
it never comes
Shall we have tea?
The old mantel
clock keeps time
with the
click-click-click of your
needles and I
see now that you
have been
re-working
that same row
all afternoon.
