Persephone

Asparagus

80 Asparagus when I see the early green, I’m flung back to that spring: the news of the tumor, words: “inoperable,” “palliative,” a gun. Asparagus in stores, even as it still snowed in Stowe in May, the dark hanging in. It was almost the only thing my mother would still eat, cooked to softness, salted, buttered. It was before IV made her ankles swell and my sister took the salt away tho she had said it was stupid to take chocolate from an old man in a rest home so he wouldn’t ruin his teeth. Pale jade of the clothes she started wanting, as if she could feel green going out of her life. “I just love the green,” she said. The past few summers she hated tiger lily orange, “color of fall,” she moaned, “summer is over.” All spring I ate asparagus too, picked out the thinnest stalks. In two months she would have been 80. In Vermont in a restaurant I’ve rarely been in since my 16th birthday party, I order salmon, puzzling to me then, see in notes it was what she ordered her last New Year’s Eve there but couldn’t swallow it, wished she had ordered chicken. I’m wearing her socks, her ring, find myself with saltine crackers, 81 bran waffles, asparagus, strawberries as if the bits of her I carry inside me, as one writer said we do our mothers, like dolls, each with another inside, are with me in the supermarkets she could spend hours in filling my cart, as she did my life, with what she wanted for me ...