Let
me spin my story anew
We
didn’t live in Guernsey Hollow, so why would I care
if I
might have had to snap potato bugs in a small garden
that
we could have had across the road
that
may have flowed there
and
probably did for someone else
that
really owned the property
and
whose little children slept three-in-a-bed
in
winter in the house that Harry Turner wanted to demolish
in
some sort of frenzy to fix it up for re-sale
by
tearing sections off first
and
you could only reach the second floor
through
a trap door in the attached shed
because
the front stairway had been torn off
with
that section of the home in the house
that
Harry Turner would like to have rebuilt
I
never spent a night in St. Albans Bay huddling
under
a WWI army coat in a summer cabin
unfortuituously
in the month of March,
never
located snakes for my brothers
among
the cracks in the rocks
on a
hillside near the campground,
nor
swam in Lake Champlain, no,
I
couldn’t have done any of that
because
we never lived there, never
breathed
that damp air all one summer
before
the job in the plastic factory dried up,
or
would have, if my father had worked there,
but
he didn’t, and he never brought home
sweet
potato mouth organs and plastic whistles
to
us kids in a small lakeside resort town
that
we never lived one spring and summer in
I
never lived in New Jersey, nor did I steal apples
from
carts in second grade, no, my brother didn’t get hit
by a
jeep driven by a guy who just came home from the war,
any
war, but maybe one in particular that he didn’t come home from
and
Mother said the guy thought he was still driving his jeep in Germany,
but
she couldn’t have said that because we didn’t live in Paterson
over
the Haledon line where they had the prettiest pansies
on
Mother’s Day which my father and I didn’t buy
for
my mother
No,
the jobs in Vermont weren’t scarce
And
I could have stayed there
So
none of this would have played out,
I
wouldn’t have moved to Boston
and
if I never worked at Merrill Lynch
and
never met him, never lived any of this, Dick Powers name
wouldn't
be on a stone in a small cemetery in Brookville, MA
in
Holbrook, MA
©2017 Muriel Thumm
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