How, oh how can I thank my dear friends for their birthday posts? To link to them here seems rather self-promoting (although you sgouldvisit theirblogs). But Jennifer Dukes Lee and Lyla Lindquist and Sandra Heska King slipped into God’s stream and helped me to celebrate my birthday.
I’ve sort of skipped the last two. I skipped 40 because it was too soon after my mom died. And 39, well, here it is:
(in case you have a thing for cancer poems, just look to the left and there are 72 of them, ready and waiting)
FOLLY
Mom and Dad came from the east bearing birthday gifts
smoked turkey, brisket, creamed
corn, potato salad, coleslaw,
sausage, beans, ribs, chocolate chunk cookies.
We dig in.
Mom, adept at hiding chemo’s forced starvation,
picks at her food (except for the cookie).
I break out the Fat Tire — our favorite microbrew,
an amber ale divinely inspired on a bike trip. I sip,
savor the label: “Follow your folly. Ours is beer.”
Mom’s is to believe until the last possible second
that she will be spared.
