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A Ritual of Cards
Carol Barrett
A couple I know collects holiday cards, tableside basket.
Each day of the new year they pick one to bless the evening
meal. I have been there, clam spaghetti with garlic and parsley
swirling in butter sauce. My mother had her own tradition,
every year set a few aside to relay to my father — a devoted wife
or husband, friend since nursing or medical school, who died
that year, the beloved naming the date, the cause, how hard it was.
Sometimes, down the road, there was happy news, marriage
to an old friend. She was glad love could tip its hat in the dark.
Her childhood best friend died of a brain tumor two months
after the first sign. When her widower found a new bride, Mom sent
armfuls of balloons. A few more snowy crimson exchanges, then
the new wife wrote, he too had died. It took Mom down again.
Grief sneaks up the shore, covering our feet, supposed to take us
somewhere. We have to sit, dry out a bit. This Christmas, we figured
we had told everyone my mother died. Flowers at the service,
heaps of crisp cards, lilac and pale green — surely the world knew.
But a few holly notes to her came through. My brother volunteered
to answer, said it wasn’t writing that was so hard, it was the replies
coming back, when he thought he was pretty much over the haunting
recollections of who she had been to so many. Mid-January, a card
from Kansas I recognize. Ah Sharon, good friend of forty years.
My first ski outing, she cautioned my date, start with the bunny slope.
When I panicked on the steep run he chose, she skied backwards
in front of me until we made it down. A little late this year. I slit
the envelope to get her news. My eyes drop to the end of two short
lines. Her husband, letting me know Sharon died, the date, his number.
He fills me in, the illness, the fall, the fractured hip. So fast. So hard.
But he’s getting by. All those years we sent haloed messages back
and forth, faithful as a chiming clock. After I left Kansas, I didn’t see her
again, though we kept up. Her green and white quilt always ready,
my rose afghan. I have lost friends before, but this is the first holiday
ringing a weighty word when the world should still be singing
Hark the Herald… This morning I watch a man high in a bright
yellow caterpillar box, unstringing lights from the blue spruce
at the corner gas station, bulbs strung across the barren air
on their way down to earth. Nothing to hold them anymore.
I wonder what lies ahead, what friend’s waves lapping up
the shore, what angel taking heaven’s outstretched hand.
—
Carol Barrett holds doctorates in both creative writing and clinical psychology. She coordinates the Creative Writing Certificate Program at Union Institute & University. Carol has published two volumes of poetry and one of creative nonfiction. A former NEA fellow in poetry, she writes from Oregon.
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