Skip to main content

My Grande' Goes A-Walkin'

My Grande goes a walking,

Winding down the street

Pushing someone’s stroller,

Sticky donuts in the seat.


My Grande goes a walking

Over hill and dale,

Holding little hands in hers,

Looking for a sale.


My Grande goes a walking

Miles in a day,

With bags of eggs, toast and ham,

And please is all we say.


My Grande goes a walking,

Passed the squealing lanes

Glasses thick and eyes grow dim,

Walking with a cane.


My Grande goes a walking

Not as far today,

Eyes too cloudy barely see

Near the house she stays.


My Grande walks no more

Down the winding street,

She watches Lawrence Welk instead

Of being carried by her feet.


Oh if I could make her breakfast, oh if I could hold her hand,

Oh if I could push her stroller,

Whisper softly and understand.


I’ll lend to her my good eyes to see with,

I’ll lend to her my strong legs to walk,


And when her body no longer tarries on the winding trails of Earth

I will go a walking for her,

Laugh and giggle on the way.


Holding onto little hands,

I’ll remember Grande’s own

That taught my feet to walk this way

And tarry not till they find home.


I love you my Grande-Cia, thank you for all the giving you have blessed me with in a lifetime, I love you and love you and love you and wish you a safe and speedy passage. We will play again next time we go a-walkin'.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...