REAL ESTATE

Marjorie Maddox

At 92, my mother was the house

I forgot I once lived in.  With her bad hips,

curved spine, and one missing breast,

she’d still power-wash dirt off her beige,

still accessorize with seasonal décor—

poinsettia scarves and earrings,

pastels for spring, no white after Labor Day.

She’d still shuffle to the mirror

to touch up the exterior with red lipstick,

then welcome me home to the home

that was her home away from home

where living was assisted.

When she pursed her lips

in the Community Room

in this old but beautiful house of hers

where the bones of her foundation creaked,

she didn’t see how her right shoulder,

lower than the left, jutted just so

toward the one eligible bachelor of 95

in the paisley-decorated room

where she refused to fall apart or age,

flirting all the way through supper—

beef stew, fried chicken, or fish fillet

served each evening at 5:00 pm sharp

in the cozy dining room wallpapered

with cottages of Cape Cod.

Once, when we called her room,

she wasn’t there. Once

when we called after dinner,

she wasn’t there. Once,

or maybe more than once,

this proper structure of a woman,

circa 1929, retired to the bedroom

on a “date” with an older man,

both politely glued to Jimmy Stewart

on a wide-screen TV larger

than any she’d ever owned

in the suburban home she owned

with my father.

My mother, too prim to breastfeed;

who weathered two husbands

(heart attack and Alzheimer’s);

my mother who went back to work at forty

and won awards selling real estate,

top in her office; my mother

whose baby body was a house

abandoned by an architect

and his lover, and then again

by the new owner.

This mother of mine,

this house in which I’d lived,

then lived outside of for sixty-two years,

now clean and tidy, now emptied out,

now for sale, now nobody’s home.

It’s been almost five years since my mother’s death. Before her passing, I penned the collection, Seeing Things, intricately exploring what it meant to be the daughter of a mother with dementia. As my mother’s memories floated away, my grief came slow and steady, so much so that after she died, it seemed there were no more grief poems to write. That changed this week. Unexpectantly, when I responded to a prompt on “houses,” fresh grief broke through—four years after her death. Today, I give you “Real Estate,” a poem that has now given me permission to write more poems on loss.