Poem: Billings 1969
A Thanksgiving toast to all mothers who have made sacrifices for their family.
Billings 1969
As the
photo shows,
she sat alone in the green
Olds in our newly poured driveway,
contemplating her new life, the dutiful wife,
pondering how she would manage a pack of four boys
on the edge of town with cliffs (called “rims” she’d learn)
to fall off, rattlesnakes lurking under rocks, and rusty nails
sticking out like harpoons from two-by-fours strewn
around. How would she make it through the
frigid, frightening Montana winter
with no friends – marooned
out on a dirt road where
we could get
snowed
in and
forgotten for
weeks and weeks
and why oh why did we
move way up here anyway,
out on this tundra, so far from home,
just so her husband could become Chief Engineer
at a sugar factory. Heavens, why? How?
My toes are numb. Where are
those boys now?
Those boys are counting their blessings, thankful for having a mom with a pioneer spirit who raised them in Big Sky Country.
A powerful evocation of a time, a place, a marriage, a family, the experience of one wife and mother that was like so many, including my mother’s — leaving Gloucester, Massachusetts, for Billings, she would sit on the bank of the Yellowstone and weep for the memory of water.