So I am thinking about the season of yard sales. Only because I am not skiing at Taos Ski Valley! Enjoy!

Estate Sale

I think of her salad mixer, the pea-yellow home furnishings, the nutcracker
on her cherry coffee table. She always had cream cheese and chives
for pretzels. Root beer in the latch refrigerator. Wearther’s in her pocket.
That run in her stocking. The corduroy khaki couch. The old room
with two single beds. The basement musk.
Thanksgiving dinner on a trampoline beneath the toothless-smile piano.

Her two-step stoop, watching my mother as a scraped-knee child,
then as a young girl with crushes, then
a young woman in a candy dress with Marlboroughs.
Picture frames of her children now. The endless gaze of her television.
The fur-lined winter jacket. Orthotic Velcro shoes. The journals
I wish she had written. Her translucent hands reaching for me
like a ghost. Like the lace sweater on a wheelchair
framing the entrance of the home, blank and locked.