Sunny Road

Gladys Marie Sills, my grandma, at 19 years of age pictured above.  I wonder what she thought would come of here life when this picture was taken.  What dreams she had, what hopes.  It is so strange to see myself in her face and eyes.  As I stroked her hair and felt her tiny hand in mine, I reminded her of all the stories she had told me over tea or on our sunday drives between LA and her home.  The job at the playing card factory where she would go round and round the table, meeting grandpa at the dance, the time she took the car and ran off to Chatham in a fit of anger and empowerment - the stories she loved to tell.  No words to share left within her mouth, she listened.  She heard.  She knew that her stories would live on and that although her world didn’t exist too far beyond a small city in ontario, that the people who kept them would and have been around the world.  comfortable and warm with a teddy bear in her arms, she heard that she was loved and that she was a good grandmother and that it was now time to sleep and have sweet dreams.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

–Mary Oliver