Delicate - 20 Poems

Indelible

 Indelible

I walk up to the door of Grandma’s house

And I slowly await her response.

It’s been three long months.

I had planned to be gone forever, or at least until school started in August.

Then again, at the age of 4, you never know what’s really going on

Or sometimes you do… but then again, you don’t

My first thought was the smell, of Grandma’s old house

That was built by her father in the year of 1955.

Someone told me that each house had a particular scent and I just said

“Nuh-uh, not my grandma’s!”

Even though it had been 3 long months without the smell of her house,

The smell of the ghetto in which we lived

And only the scent of the country-side of South Carolina,

My nose didn’t bother to register the well-known scent.

I stood there for a moment, a worried expression playing on my face.

“What’s if she doesn’t remember me?” I ask my mother

Who just brushes off the idea with a, “Girl…”

And then I walk up to the house, suitcase in hand

Go up to the door to see a grandmother who was 3 whole months older

And even though I still had those troubled child thoughts of her not remembering,

She embraced me, and erased any thought from my mind.

“What’s that?” she asked. “Did you get yourself a southern accent?”

Grandmother smiled, and I did too, not realizing what she said or meant.

I went to grandma’s room, which is still the same as it is today,

Except her wooden drawers were replaced when the old ones fell apart from being over stuffed.

I release myself from her hold to see the mirror on the wall,

Which I was too short to see myself through

And my aunty Dealia’s old picture from elementary,

Where she had lost all but two teeth.

To see my mother’s trophies from when she was at that school for pregnant teens,

Where she won an award for math and social studies.

Even today, when I ask how about it, she says she did nothing special,

That ever one else at the school was dumb and pregnant.

To see the couch with 3 seats still in front of an antique, no-longer-sold Zenneth TV,

Which is placed next to a loveseat.

To see a toaster on top of the microwave on the kitchen table.

I love my grandmother, and 10 years later, at the age of 85,

She is still that woman who was only 3 months older that I had missed so much

And I still wonder what our old house smells of.