Dzidzi, my grandfather, had a big vegetable garden behind the house. He loved working there. He enjoyed having us kids pick tomatoes and peppers and onions and carrots and beets from his garden. Babci, my grandmother, would preserve many of the vegetables and fruits reaped in late summer and early fall.
After my grandfather died, I so wanted to write a story in verse about my Babci and Dzidzi. It didn’t work out too well. Some years later, an image from my childhood of my grandmother working in the cellar preserving tomatoes in mason jars popped into my head. That image gave me the inspiration for writing the poem Saving Summer—and for an entire collection of poems about my grandparents, their house, their yard, their garden—and the happy times I spent their with my cousins and sister. The collection takes me through a year at their house. The unpublished collection is titled A Home for the Seasons.
SAVING SUMMER
In the cellar
Babci sits on an old kitchen chair
made new with glossy gray paint.
Wearing an apron blooming with faded flowers,
she leans over the tub of steaming water,
plucks out plump tomatoes,
and peels off the wet, papery skins.
She fills shiny jars with soft red pulp,
stretches on rubber sealers,
presses down moon-round lids,
clicks closed the metal clamps.
She places the jars in a wire basket
and lowers them into a pot of bubbling water to cook.
On wooden shelves in a corner
she stores stewed tomatoes beside rows of pickled beets,
golden peach slices, green piccalilli,
and carrots the color of October pumpkins.
Standing there in late afternoon,
sunlight shining through a small side window,
I see her harvest preserved:
a rainbow glistening in glass.
Babci is keeping summer alive in jars.
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Over at Wild Rose Reader, I have a post titled Old Poems & New Furniture.
Sara Lewis Holmes has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Read Write Believe.
