Poem of the Week, by ee cummings
Twenty years ago, when my grandmother died, I put two of her flowered dresses in a plastic bag and tied it up tight. That bag has sat on a closet shelf every place I’ve lived since. Sometimes I open it up and breathe deep. Her scent brings the physical sensation of her love back to me.
That particular kind of love is why I keep my children’s doors shut tight. They are grown and live in distant cities but when I open their doors and step inside, there they are again in the lingering scent of their clothes, their blankets, their essence. Unlike when they lived at home, their beds are neatly made. Making beds, that small daily antidote to chaos, soothes me.
Someday I won’t be here to make my bed anymore. And while I don’t know what I smell like, the people I love probably do.
in spite of everything, by e.e. cummings
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds
– before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.
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At a museum yesterday I sat and stared at this painting. It transported me to a world with a wooden school desk and a clock ticking on the wall. The hot waxy smell of melted crayons. Balloons in a summer rain sinking slowly to the ground. A miniature wooden circus in a clearing in the woods. Indistinct voices in the distance playing some kind of game.
In second grade one of my classmates died of a common childhood disease that most of us weathered without incident. One day he was at his desk in the row next to the door, and the next day he wasn’t. In my mind I see him as he was in his Picture Day photo: dark hair parted on the side, sweater over shirt.
Once, at a Twins play-off game, I sat next to an older couple. They opened a tote and pulled out sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, peeled carrots, small bags of grapes, and cookies. Dinner, packed at home and brought to the game. There was something about this couple I loved.
That woman sitting on the bar stool with a martini and a magazine, or alone on her couch spinning imaginary people into books, or flying solo around the world: she is me. But won’t you be lonely? is a question I’ve heard a lot in my life, and I don’t know how to answer it, because isn’t everyone, somewhere inside themselves, lonely? 
Last weekend I watched as seven brothers and their sister gathered around a polished casket that held the body of their mother, a woman loved by all. The night before, the siblings had stayed up late laughing and telling stories of how she used to shoo them up to bed with a broom, how she taught Phys Ed for thirty-nine years while delivering papers before dawn and working in the family print shop at night, how she loved wine (with a few ice cubes) and fast-pitch softball and mint chocolate chip ice cream and the Minnesota Twins.
One of my best friends and I sat on my porch last night talking about how our lives might have been different. What if I’d made myself deal with that suicide instead of trying to escape the pain? What if she’d said yes to that job? What if I’d stayed in New England? What if we’d mothered our children differently?
Alison McGhee 