Reminiscing

As their colors begin to turn,
each day a little more
brown and yellow and red,
the trees seem to be reminiscing.
“Remember?” they say to each other
on the cool wind.

“Remember May and June,
when we burst into life,
how every day was a celebration
of long anticipated beginnings?”

They romanticize a bit, of course,
focusing on the highlights,
forgetting the storms, the heat.

They make me think of my mother,
who would recount
these glossy stories
of our childhood that,
from my perspective,
sounded only remotely true.

In my young adulthood,
I felt compelled to correct her.
She painted with a broad bright brush,
I was a stickler for detailed light and shadow.
She rewrote our narrative
as a happily-ever-after fairy tale,
I was all historical nonfiction.

But on this crisp fall day,
I find that,
like the trees,
like my mother,
I am content to leave behind
memories of the worry and exhaustion,
frustration and monotony of motherhood
and focus instead on a day
(or conglomerate of days)
long ago
when I sat on this porch swing
with my three year old daughter
in her little corduroy overalls.

As the landscape around us
turned brown and yellow and red,
we disappeared together
into the soothing world
of picture books,
reading one
after another
after another.

By Maria Brady-Smith
Photo by Mike Smith