By Miles Patrick Yohnke
© 2010 All Rights Reserved.
for Phyllis Gerein
We headed out, out we headed,
through an open window we heard the whine of tires on the pavement,
that sound of hot black tar asphalt beneath us.
Me,
driving two sisters,
my Aunt and my Mom,
searching for their innocence,
retracing their youth.
On back roads now,
four wheels on gravel roads,
from Landis, Handel, on to Leipzig,
in that province of Saskatchewan.
Dust flying, as we headed west,
it was the summer of '05.
I watched them revisit their youth once again.
Two sisters now in their seventies,
no signs of wrinkles, no signs of grey hair.
but for this day, back in their teens,
laughing and giggling,
like little schoolgirls would.
No signs of my aunt with her loss of a daughter,
twenty years earlier to a car accident.
No signs of a life to an abusive, alcoholic husband.
No signs of wiping away tears.
No signs. Just happiness.
For today they saw with brand new eyes.
Like when we went to the second generation
Chinese restaurant where we stopped at to eat.
And there we ate hope.
I would witness a special kind of freedom maybe only sisters could enjoy.
That ethereal freedom to share one's innermost thoughts,
to be there no matter what, whatever was going on.
I heard enchanting stories from their childhoods.
What a privilege for me!
My aunt wore a smile on her face that day,
In spite of all the events of her life.
She always had a smile for another,
No signs of her trouble, for it was no trouble to help another.
There are some who drift in and out through the plains of doubt.
She met despair and defeat with grace.
With the grace of God.
She would die the following spring.
To the same disease that took her first child,
forty years earlier.
