The Poet's Touch |
| My flight arrives early. I rent a car and drive south into clover country seven miles from the city. Plowed earth awakens the senses and I drive faster. Around the bend the gravel road crunches and curves onto a two acre plot of land where the yellow house rests in canopied shade of twelve locust trees. Wide-eyed dormers watch as I search for the slate roof chip by the chimney. (That hit was my first home run.) In the yard behind our home stands the playhouse—a caring uncle's gift. The trolley car still wears dad's faded coat of lemon paint and sleeps beneath mom's willow grove. Half-veiled visions tap into a memory of agile youths who summer on the trolley roof. Sister's jump proves that umbrellas do not float— her injury heals long before her pride. In moonlight, we five scurry atop the trolley car to plot honeysuckle-hay-romps and skinny-dip mischief in the creek. For a time, I cannot focus my camera when the sun stretches giants across the lawn. I turn to leave and the old house inhales a screened-porch breeze. The hammock beckons—the wicker swing waits— tomorrow I'll bring tea. "A gate opens and I am home. I see the lace if only past the gate of memory." -- Betty Adams |
| Rita Goodgame has been published in Woman's World, Grandmother Earth, and in A Fordham Anthology. She has won an Arkansas Writers' Grand Conference Literary Award, First Place awards in ByLine Magazine and prose/poerty awards in The National League of American Pen Women, Pioneer Branch. She finds great pleasure writing stories for her seventeen grandchildren. |
| Homecoming by Rita Goodgame |
© 2009 Rita Goodgame. All rights reserved.
