"It must be June"

A found poem, by my mom

<Welcome to Sandwich Season, adventures in middle age, sandwiched between aging parents and growing children ... and other duties as assigned.>

Hi friends—

A year ago today I was in the midst of emptying my parents’ house of the previous 32 years and trying to find new homes for generations of stuff.

With the sheer quantity of items, the emotional attachments, the discovery of mold in the basement and, most importantly, my mom being in hospice care, I felt like I was in some kind of hell.

And yet, there were moments of sweetness.

Take, for example, the writing I found in one of my mom’s old notebooks. It’s just a list of observations she made one early summer morning, but with it she captured a snapshot of our family’s life in the 1980s, when I was in junior high or high school, and my brother was in elementary school.

Mom, on the right, with her lifelong friend Kay (maybe the friend in the poem who called from afar) in our back yard in the 1980s.

I will transcribe the page below, but here it is in my mom’s handwriting:

June
by Eleanor Coomber

It must be June
     because the counters are sticky with Kool-Aid fixings
     because there are elm seeds in the refrigerator and the [dryer’s] lint basket
     because Matt comes in from his Kool-Aid stand needing change for a $10 bill
     because Sarah has time to read all she wants
     because Jim has no time—Reading Conference* 
     because the perfume of peonies fills the living room
     because peaches ripen on the table 
     because blue jays and squirrels vie for the sunflower seeds 
     because Pedro [our cat] can’t get enough grass to eat—which ends up in the carpet in a wet mass
     because the wrens never tire of chattering
     because good friends call from afar—they’ll be passing through
     because I find time to jot these observations down.
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*My dad chaired a reading & writing conference for teachers every June at Concordia College. My mom assisted Dad with the conference for a while, but her involvement must have begun after this piece was written. Because once she got involved, neither of them had any time in June!  

You can do this too

For me, this piece of notebook paper is a treasure. It gives me a glimpse of the world through my mom’s eyes, from a time when she was younger than I am now. I’m sure she enjoyed jotting it down, and now, decades later, I get to enjoy reading it.

What might you share with your family or friends?

I invite you to take the start of my mom’s piece—“It must be June”—and create a list of your own “becauses.”

Or if you’d like a different type of prompt, here’s a simple tool I created for capturing life moments.

Take good care,

Sarah

P.S. See below for a video I shot of a mystery gadget on June 5, 2023. Can you guess what it is?

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Share your thoughts

What tells you and/or your family that “it must be June”?

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Just for fun …

My mom loved kitchen gadgets. Can you guess what we used this one for?

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