Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Small Town


My childhood self
still walks the streets of the village
where I loved to visit
a grandmother, dead long ago.
Her aged friends
are still vivid in my mind.
One had a parrot that nipped my nose
and a goldfish pond
where the brilliant fish
eluded my childish grasp.
Another came to tea
and was given elderberry wine
because “the doctor ordered it.”
A glowering distant cousin 
with a crippled foot who came to visit
preferred to sleep on a feather bed,
so in the heat of summer
I dragged the dusty thing from the attic,
grumbling and resentful of that gloomy relative.
A box of demi-tasse cups
was given me by one of those women.
“Don’t wait too long to marry,”
was her advice.  -- ”I did.”
I sensed the sorrow of her life.

Unmarried women of uncertain age
seemed prevalent.
Why did they never wed?
Did the young men leave
for livelier towns?
Or did their beaux
go off to war and die?
Their locked trunks in the attic
were seldom opened,
holding treasures (I supposed)
for which they had no room
in the straitened circumstances
to which they had come.

Now aging as well,
I return to find
old houses remain,
still beautiful and cared for,
and the county courthouse
with the Civil War cannonball
still lodged in its pillar
looks solid and unchanged.
But busy stores
that then sold thread
and shoes and ice cream
now stand empty and forlorn,
and the ghosts of my childhood friends
walk the silent streets.

© Peggy Latham, 2012

County Courthouse; photo by Tony Russell

1 comment:

jean said...

I enjoyed going back in time to simpler days---wonderful evocation of a childhood in a small town where life moved slowly and people had time to have tea and conversation. And I loved the ghosts that still wander, though everything else in the town has moved ahead in time.