Monday, September 5 “I watch my grandmother”
Labor Day in Motown calls out people who work for wages, to organize so that their individual voices become collective, a union of working people. Labor Day in Motown means to remind people who work for wages that influence in the public order does not come easy.
Labor Day in Motown means picnics and laughter, beer with brats grilling, means cooking for each other. Labor Day is a holiday: reminds us that not all our work is work for wages; lots of it is work for family and friends. Not all that family labor is cooking, though a lot of it is.
My mother cooked a lot and knew what she was up to when she did. She also loved washing clothes in an old wringer-washing machine, she told us as she aged into her nineties that carrying clean wet laundry up 8 stairs from the basement to hang the clothes on the back yard line kept her aging body active. One of my favorite poets, her youngest granddaughter, Terri, paid attention and wrote about her.
Here’s one of my favorites, an homage to my mother, a working woman on Labor Day.
This is so short I hardly need to invite reading it out loud.
Have a blest Labor Day.
john sj
Summer in Wisconsin
I watch my grandmother,
ninety years old and arthritic,
smearing Vaseline on the poles of bird feeders.
A squirrel climbs one despite,
shimmies up to steal seeds,
brazen in the sunlight.
Terri Breeden