Lingering Forever

 Her fingers worked the needles and yarn

like she was kneading bread dough blind.

Looking up to gauge my response to what

she had said, she’d knit and knit without pause.

It was not long before I realized that my

mother used to do the same.  And somehow

as I sat with this hospice patient, listening

to her tell her tales, one by one I saw the 

women of my life enter the room.  Mom,

Mom-mom, Mimi, Nanna, Mertz, Karen and

Ruth, Aunt Pat, Aunt Norma, Aunt Betty, Dawn 

and Pat joined her, knee to knee, needles tapping out 

their cloth.  It was then I first knew - deep down -

I carry those women with me - EVERYWHERE.

Those first and powerful women of my life, 

they have knitted themselves an endless

blanket of my days even as they were 

nowhere in view, just always under the

chatter of knitting, behind the threading of

a needle, or beyond the cutting of their

cloth.  Somehow connecting me to

who I would become.  Really, no words.

Just their ghostly appearance doing what 

they did, all the while as I listened to this

woman slowly dying.  And the others.

All the others.  Slowly leaving through the years.

They are all in there, in me, lingering forever.