Resurrection Clothes

A Letter From a Friend Who’s Dead The other day I got a letter from a friend who’s dead. She wrote it first, of course, to tell me things she wanted said about our friendship, all the fun we’d had, the talks about things near our hearts, things happy and things sad. And now I’m thinking how so many dearest friends are gone: the Judy who died years ago, my nearly-sister Gayle, Patricia, Mrs. Faulk, Mary Ann and Sally, Bernie and the Judy I received the letter from…. Then it occurs to me how all the people at the breakfast table of my childhood left and left and left and left, and I alone am here, recalling dimly or with unexpected clarity those ancient times. But then I think how life has multiplied the friends, the family—never to replace the ones now gone, of course, but filling in some empty spaces, holes left gaping when they went. How many more will go before I join the great collection on the other side? I cannot know, of course, and th...

In the Armor Woods        for Murphy, Betty and Mike Walking here today brings so much back, such joy once had, so sad. Old Murphy, kind sweet man, and Betty Murphy’s feisty fun child-doting wife, who loved our little grandson Gus, loved his hair long, even at age three and four. That’s just Gus! she said.  Now, our preteen Gus has short hair, bleached! Still sweet thank God but not the little dumpling they once knew. Murphy, Betty gone, the woods so fallen too. This windfall must be walked around, this nature going back to nature, as it always wants to do.    So young it seems now (in my early 60s then!) no thought that everything would change this way. But that’s just how life goes and goes and goes.  It is all right. I must believe it so. Choose happy or nostalgic sad. My choice. Let’s smile and love this day, this walk, this time of life. Let’s live! This walk, this day— they’re so muc...

Of all the detritus in this drawer (why did I save this stuff?) amid the paperclips, the capless pens and penless caps,  the rubber bands, the scraps of paper with a title of a book  that someone recommended once, the business cards,  addresses from old envelopes, my daddy’s magnifying glass —again I see him reading as he sat in his upholstered chair—   there is a tape… An old cassette... the label says it's “Prince and Leslie playing.” Underneath the names I’d written “12” and “7.”   Then, past the early '80s tunes they had recorded from the radio —and so I’d never played it through, just thinking, “Well, I’ll listen to the rest someday,” and now that I am cleaning out the drawer I let it play on that old tape recorder that I found while cleaning off a shelf the other day— I hear my children’s voices. “I’m thinking pos-tiv-ly,” the younger drawls. “Prince is gonna…” Crack! A cue stick hits a ball and then more cr...