YOUNG AGAIN

         golden shovel after William Stafford’s “Fall Wind” 

The nurse swung my mother-in-law’s legs under the blanket the last                      
time I saw her, calves like a girl’s, at 94. She licked icing from white cake, a late-night           
snack. In this final hospitalization, I heard her relief, her lightness in saying, I don’t think I
will make it this time. Apple body consumed to core, she heard
her truth, remembered her mother’s sudden death forcing her to leave school, raise the  
young ones. Remembered her 80^th birthday when I gave her her first
pierced earrings (so pretty on girls in church), sitting on a stool at Claire’s, legs dangling, cold        
alcohol on her earlobes (too big), like she was thirteen, sidewalk onlookers smiling in the wind—
gold studs now, large pearls for life, snapped in her purse before we stepped outside.

A retired educator, Terrie Elaine Joplin taught English in her home state of Washington, and in Illinois and North Carolina. She holds an M.S. in Education from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and her National Board Certification in North Carolina. Her poems appear in Door is a Jar, MER Online Folio, ONE ART, SWWIM Every Day, The Westchester Review, the anthology Recovering Greenness, and elsewhere. Terrie and her husband reside with their multi-generational family and four tuxedo cats in New York. She enjoys gardening, painting, and road trips to geographical wonders.