The house in happier times. A wedding feast is going on. The organ players, accompanied by a group of guests, are approaching our house. My grandmother is at the entrance of the yard.
I wrote this poem after coming across a pink robe in one of the closets in my country home in Greece. My mother had loved shopping and enjoyed buying gifts for friends and loved ones. Every time I rummaged through her purchases, I always found something interesting, even if some had become too old-fashioned to wear or use.
One day I unearthed a pink robe with the price tag still attached to it. It had been bought almost 3 decades earlier, from a department store in Canada. It had a small pocket with a bright flower embroidered on it.
I removed the price tag and put it on. Many items had been destroyed over the years, as the mice made themselves comfortable in the drawers and cupboards of the century-old house, where mom's old treasures lay.
The woolen kerchiefs and traditional dresses my mother and grandmother had worn daily now had holes in them, eaten by moths that loved to work in the dark secrecy of the uninhabited house. The bright colored ribbons the women used to braid their long hair with were still packed away, unused, along with countless aprons, slips, girdles, pantyhose, Christmas decorations...a paraphernalia of memories and comical traces of some serious shopping therapy going on back then.
I became melancholy. Surrounded by things, but no people. Silence.
My mother passed away 24 years ago. My grandmother 38 years ago.
And this robe became a metaphor of not putting my life on hold but living it. Polyester resists stretching, creasing, shrinking. It resists the sun. It does not breathe. "Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?" the poet Mary Oliver asks.
Yes. I was breathing as much as the polyester robe was. It was time for some changes before it was too late.
pink polyester robe
bury me in my
pink polyester robe
rot resistant in its
timeless cheapness
promises of a
wrinkle-free existence
