A Song for Sunday

a villanelle about the place between then and now

It has been a week. We realized last weekend that my daughter needed to be back at her university a week early than we’d thought. Oops. Which made for a bit of a scramble to pack, as well as an unplanned six plus hours in the car for me on Monday. Not to mention the sting of losing our girls’ week. With my husband away for business we had planned a foray into Gilded Age, a Gilmore Girls marathon, and some as yet unspecified Jane Austen viewing. We had meals planned, a couple of baking projects, and a Yahtzee tournament in the offing. But, alas, it was not to be.

I arrived back home late Monday night just ahead of a snow storm. No complaints on that front. I love a good snow storm. But it reminded me of how many Januaries I’ve been home shoveling snow while my husband is somewhere warm, or at least warmer than here. It’s not his fault. It’s a regular thing for the company where he has worked for the last fifteen years. It’s predictable and expected, much like cold temps and snowfall in Maine in January. But this is the first year I’ve done it all alone. I’ve always had at least one of the kids with me.

I’m perfectly capable of shoveling and running the snow blower. I’ve got meals in the freezer to minimize the whole cooking-for-one thing. I’m fine. It’s just not a lot of fun to find myself on my own when it wasn’t what I had planned. I’m missing my family. We went from having the house full for the holidays, family dinner every night to…crickets. My son left first to return to campus for an internship, then my husband, and my daughter. And now here I am in a very quiet house, waiting three days before the dishwasher is full enough to run. It’s an adjustment.

My husband has always traveled often for work. Less now since the pandemic, but it’s ramping back up a bit. We know how to handle it. And it’s definitely less work for me now than it was when the kids were young. There’s that law of nature that assures nobody gets a stomach bug until Daddy’s plane has left the tarmac. But it’s been many years since I was actually on my own when he went away. It’s a little weird. I’ll adjust, but I also know we’ll both be really happy when the only traveling we do is together. The poem below is about that.

The poem below is also a villanelle, in case you thought I might get all the way through this post without touting another obscure poetic form. The villanelle dates back to 17th century France. It is made up of five tercets with a quatrain at the end. The first and last lines of the first stanza are repeated as the last line of the subsequent stanzas, alternatingly. Then, in the quatrain, those two lines become the last two of the poem. Villanelles often have an ABA rhyme scheme, but I’m not much for rhyming. I’ve also taken some liberties with the repeating of lines, and gone with more of a repetition of theme. Call the poetry police on me if you like, but I’m still going to call it a villanelle.

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A Song for Sunday

We will walk when the bells ring on a Sunday
away from the train at the bottom of the road
the day wide open, your bag unpacked

We will walk through the pines, an extra loop to inhale,
past the gates, among the stones and all the way to the ponds
where you can only just hear the bells ring on a Sunday

And we will not count the days except to say when
we will walk again up Calton Hill, up Arthur’s Seat,
the day wide open, our bags stowed at Drummond Place

Home again we will paint the walls a new shade of green 
and sit together reading the papers, our tea growing cold,
not knowing we’re listening for the bells until they ring

And then we will stretch and smile and walk out
to the cove to watch the grasses wave and count the egrets,
the day wide open, your bag stowed away, forgotten

One day we will not count the days until you fly away again,
but now I make a list and a plan to navigate the time until you return 
We will walk today with the bells tolling as they do each Sunday,
the last day before you leave, your bag packed and ready at home

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I’m always interested in what topics or ideas lend themselves best to these kinds of closed forms. Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a villanelle, and so is Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” Check them out and if you write one of your own, I’d love to read it.

What I’m Reading:

• I grabbed The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell off the shelving cart at the library and brought it home. I’ve just barely started it, but I have a very good feeling.

• I’m also reading Prayers & Run-on Sentences by Stuart Kestenbaum, a former poet laureate of Maine. So many of his poems have this wonderful conversational feel. I find myself drawn in so completely that I’m surprised when they end. Great stuff.

Here on Substack:

• Mary Roblyn
  ’s post about her mother’s cake and the bowls in which it was made, One Cup of Sugar Divided, was a beautiful meditation on food and memory.

• And

  15thCenturyFeminist
  has done it again with a post about Eleanor of Aquitaine that is packed with historical detail and makes really deft connections to modern anti-aging culture. The bonus for me was that I can’t think of Eleanor of Aquitaine without thinking of Katharine Hepburn. And how nice is it to thinking about Katharine Hepburn?!?

Happy Reading, Everybody. And if it’s cold where you are, stay warm!