One tiny whiff of a certain cedar shrub whooshes me
back to Huntington Street and a picket fence around
my grandparents’ yard where we kids made our own games.
My sister and I picked plums from the tree at the back fence
the neighbor advising us to make baskets of our skirts
my grandmother then scolding us for doing so
and using some choice words for her neighbor.
She did make anyway jars and jars of plum jelly
that none of us particularly liked but ate halfheartedly.
Two white Adirondack chairs sat in the backyard
always filled on a warm summer evening by the adults,
my grandparents, my parents or my aunt though
we girls sometimes perched on the wide flat arms.
A square contraption of a clothesline that turned,
a cloth sack of wooden clothespins, an apple basket
lined with cloth that my grandmother used for laundry,
a chimneyed red brick barbecue where my grandfather
and later my aunt grilled bratwurst and hot dogs,
all those things long ago fallen into disrepair
and discarded, the adults of my memories dead and gone
and surely the cedar shrubs from which all this springs
have since died of old age and been replaced by
azaleas or blue hydrangeas.