Writing Women

Age-mates, we accompany each other on this journey to the end of our lives. Our writing group dissolved after nine years, but the six of us who were there till the end miss each other. We came together today to celebrate our friendships, to talk about life, death, aging, and the cracks in everything. It was good to speak again about what matters, what we are learning, what we know now that we didn’t know the last time we met. We find our lives dramatic, unpredictable, even shocking. We listen to each other with sharp attention, knowing each time could be our last. I blipped Hilda and Margie three years ago. We didn’t know then what we know now. That’s how it is, always taking us by surprise. Three more of us in the Extras: Tommee, Daryl, Sheri. 

I brought this poem by Natasha Trethewey:

Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky

It is 1965. I am not yet born, only
a fullness beneath the empire waist
of my mother’s blue dress.

The ruffles at her neck are waves
of light in my father’s eyes. He carries
a slim volume, leather-bound, poems

to read as they walk. The long road
past the college, through town,
rises and falls before them,

the blue hills shimmering at twilight.
The stacks at the distillery exhale,
and my parents breathe evening air

heady and sweet as Kentucky bourbon.
They are young and full of laughter,
the sounds in my mother’s throat

rippling down into my blood.
My mother, who will not reach
forty-one, steps into the middle

of a field, lies down among clover
and sweet grass, right here, right now--
dead center of her life.


In Domestic Work, Graywolf Press, Copyright 2000 by Natasha Trethewey.