“Go and find enough sky
to make a man a pair of trousers.”
We looked at one another,
daughter and mother,
through the glass heat
above the sugar fire.
I had said it again:
“There’s nothing to do.”
I had been to the river
to look for fiddleheads
on my way with another pail
of sloshing sap;
she would pour it
into the foaming gold
that frothed and bubbled
in the lobster pot.
And I had broken fallen limbs
into a tinder pile,
and handed her half a wall
of elder wood,
a chunk at a time.
All day she had stood
by her steaming hearth
while six months’ snowfall
rippled away, and wind
from a thousand miles of ice
roared among the branches
overhead. A spark popped,
and she stirred the hissing logs,
as though the years
and the wars in her wake
would boil away,
give themselves over
to ash and smoke.
I was tired of the wind,
tired of the cold,
afraid that I
could not be worth it all.
“Let’s see what the trees
have given us,” she said,
and she ladled warm ooze
out over the snow.
She took off a glove,
and lifted the soft taffy.
“Ah, syrup!”
It was then I remembered
the clean white sheets
of home.