National Poetry Month Offering #4

 I Belong

The farmhouse smelled

Of lingering must and cobwebs.

Fine red clay dust lay undisturbed,

Left by the whims of wind,

Gathered by gravity.

Someone had swept,

But not recently.

Debris deposited haphazardly in the corner.

A trove of trash or treasure

Begging to be perused.

Bits of refuse, burned out matches.

An empty sardine tin,

A hardware store calendar from 1969.

Powdery coffee grounds

And eggshells

Wrapped neatly in the local yellowed newspaper.

What’s this? I thought as I pulled at

A protruding corner of black cardboard.

To my surprise, a photograph in browntone!

Four young women,

The one on the left looked back at me

With eyes like mine.

Reassuring me

In the summer of my fourteenth year,

Yes, I am your grandmother.

Yes, you belong.

Growing up I had almost no contact with my father's side of the family but we often lived near members of my mother's family. I felt like an odd duck since my siblings favored the maternal side. It was on the trip south to Mississippi when my paternal grandfather died that I found a photo of his wife, my grandmother, with her sisters. It was a revelation to see her, I was named for her and now I had found that I resembled her.