Days Like These...

Peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink
I watch him walk back down the path –
no longer with the swinging, rolling gait
I could have recognised from a mile away;
he’d been to feed the birds...and it takes him
a while...this man whose motto – some twelve
years since became, ‘Sorry; I don’t do quick!’

He, who used to live life in the fast lane, for whom
time took on a whole new meaning; this man
I’d helped dress this morning; did up his shirt
and tied his tie. So I hear him come in...finally,
after fumbling for his keys he swears blind
have deliberately gone missing, but finds them
in the end, with a little help from me.

His hands, now with their customary tremor, dig
deep into his pocket; on this occasion, for a little
silver box of pills – twenty at least, pink, white,
blue and yellow. I fetch a glass of water as he
lays down on the kitchen table a wicker basket
brim full of early Maris Piper...and a cucumber,
lovingly reared in the greenhouse from seed,
in the shape of a question mark.

But we’ve both, long-since stopped asking ‘why?’
Learned to accept what life has deigned to dish out to us
for whatever reasons it may have had, and be grateful
of our late daughter’s legacy...if she could carry on
from day to day, always a smile on her lips, then
the hell can we! Each year, though, we can’t help
but dread winter the more, but when the freeze
finally sets in, it’s remembering days like these
will keep us warm.