How Many Springs

                             

How many springs have passed

since she watched the first green shoots break from the earth

And the bright blooms unfurl?

A handful of the precious bulbs she’d planted in the fall

when first they’d raised the little cabin--

A token of hope, of making a home. Putting her mark on the land

Here I am and here I mean to be.

She cut switches of forsythia – yellow bells, they called them – from a neighbor’s plantings,

Box wood, too, and rooted them all in the damp earth beside the spring. 

And in a few years, heavy with her second child, she set out the little plants – making it pretty around the cabin.

Young uns made hidey holes beneath the boxwood and brought her fistfuls of the daffodils.

That multiplied and spread with every year – like her own family

Moved off, most of them.

But they still returned – sometimes in, spring, with the daffodils

and sometimes for Decoration Day – when the piney flowers lifted their gaudy heads.

 

Long gone, that woman, that cabin;

But her mark remains.