I Wrote a Poem

It’s been a long while since I blogged. I have so much to share and don’t really know where or how to begin. It’s all good. No worries there. But it’s been a jumble, a rumble, an unfolding, a sorting out—-literally—-of my entire life and beyond. And as I unpack the pieces of time lost and found, I wrote this poem inspired by a painting my landlord, Penny Fitzgerald, created called “Yellow Dog”. Penny’s illustration, I believe, is for sale, in case it speaks to you as it did me. Her contact info is: https://www.instagram.com/pennyfstudio/

Both words and picture are featured in this month’s Cambria Center for the Arts Show.

A Life Long Considered

By Janet Barker

She left a life

       she knew

For a life she’d long considered, 

       with her yellow dog, 

       a ceramic yellow mixing bowl,

       haphazardly packed in her often-unreliable yellow van,

       canopied beneath the blistering Central Valley yellow sun.

It was a day she could have just as easily turned around 

       and returned to the almost-empty storage unit,

where she’d carefully stack two dozen see-through bins containing yellowed images of a life mostly well lived

       back when her world was the yellow house,

       with the yellow wheelbarrow, geographically centered in the city of her beginnings,

              close to work,  

              close to family, 

              close to every memory she ever had—

              her three children times 48 years,

             grandchildren, friends, ex-husband, extended family, 

             chickens, rabbits, cats, a turtle,

           a pond full of goldfish, a guest egret, and her beloved pups,

           Tahoe, Maggie, Bailey and Monet. 

Tears clouded the woman’s vision as she drove past her childhood home, the school she attended and once taught at, and the 100-year-old beach cottage she salvaged and saved. 

“Thank you,” she cried to everything and everyone who had led her to this moment  

       leaving behind, taking with, 

       on the road 

                       to the next chapter 

       with Yellow Dog, who wagged her modest tail as the woman 

       cranked up 1970s tunes and bobsledded down the 46

       through watercolor hills toward the misty, cauliflower sea. 

“Is this heaven?” she asked her yellow companion.

 “It is,” Yellow Dog assured, before disappearing into the pearly stones, 

            only to one day meet again.