Even in the long view

As luck would have it, year of birth, class

and grammar school, each fall of the letters scrabbled with felicity

serendipity, so here’s a house, a garden, pool,

a cultivated life

some years spent nurturing

small hands warm in mine, measured on the wall, marked

fed not forced good books, good manners

as sunflowers stretch towards the sun.

House: walls painted, repainted, soft-furnished, re-arranged

packed in boxes, shipped abroad

pottery in shapeless lumps tissue-wrapped with care

these things saved, selected

those things not.

And after all the choosing/ cherishing, honing house into a home

down decades tear and wear

a brass lamp’s bloomed, children have grown apart and some so dear-beloved

now are gone.

Still taking one thing with another, plus the long view

looking back

oh it’s hard to make a judgement

give a grade, evaluate

for a lifetime’s worth of choices

even in the long-view, hindsight, twenty-twenty

looking back.

June 10th 2013, Hounoux