Judith Waller Carroll
Judy and her husband, Jerry after their move to Oregon celebrating Christmas with their twin grandkids, Tova (l) and Jack(r) and baby Reid, in Judy’s arms. Two-year-old Sawyer was camera shy.
By Judith Waller Carroll
In 2019, my husband and I sold our home in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, a retirement community nestled in the Ouachita Mountains, and moved to Portland, Oregon, where our son and his family live and a day's drive from San Francisco, where our daughter and her family live. These poems capture some of the angst of leaving a home we loved, the adjustment to urban life after over a decade of living near the woods and the excitement and joy of living close to—and eventually with—our son and his family.
Appraisal
Tomorrow a man from the buyer’s bank
will tally improvements and subtract shortcomings,
like the chipped paint in the kitchen
and a dishwasher that’s seen better days.
The meadow look we so love
may be the first strike against us
as he walks past vines of mint,
ornamental grass with flowering feathers
to the front porch we built three years ago
to replace the deck we rarely used
that didn’t go with the line of the house.
How do you explain to a bean counter
the hours of thumbing through design books,
the long conversations with a local carpenter
who hand-sanded the cedar pillars
for a timeless, craftsman look.
“This is such a pretty house,” everyone tells us,
but a numbers man may not be charmed
by bookcases that wrap around windows
or French doors that let in the morning light.
He may prefer ceiling fans
with a plain globe in the middle
to handcrafted chrome and milk glass
sent away for from an artisan in Maine.
But we’ll scour the sink, polish the doorknobs,
wash the sunroom windows that look out on the garden
with the stone bench where sometimes a fox naps
before ambling back to the woods.
Perhaps the gladiolas on the mantle,
the last of the season, will go unnoticed,
but they make a home look cheerful.
If it weren’t still in the 90s, I’d coax you to lay a fire.
All this work to sell a house we’d rather stay in
a sale we almost hope falls through.
The White Pelicans of Oregon
Some days it rains and rains
in this new place I mostly like,
where white pelicans
with enormous yellow bills
glide above the water
with their necks withdrawn.
During the breeding season,
the tops of their heads
become dusted with black
and a horn grows to deflect injury
from their delicate pouches.
I’ve read that at a distance, migrating flocks
have been mistaken for UFOs.
Sometimes I feel such conflict.
One moment I yearn to soar
back to the last place I left,
the next, I am content to watch
as the birds rise without me.
Sweet Consolation
Gold-tinged oak leaves drift to the sidewalk,
a robin hops ahead, a squirrel scrambles up a tree.
On the wooded trails I used to walk,
there would be wheeling hawks,
a fox ambling back to his den.
But I have come to appreciate
the subtlety of nature in the city:
a tree frog outside my window,
the honk of geese as they fly somewhere else.
Some evenings, the streetlight on the corner
tricks me into believing it’s the moon,
round, white globe floating through branches of maple,
soft shadows of darkness
turning the lamppost into a lodgepole pine.
Zee
The geese from the nature preserve
fly past our house, their piping
a cross between hounds after a fox
and boisterous boys that taunt and tease.
Our grandson, barely a year
and right on the edge of speech,
points at the window and says, Zee,
his word for everything—the kitchen lights,
the spider plant, and these geese
forming a V as they gain height,
their cries now drowned out
by the roar and rattle of the garbage truck
as it lifts our recycle bin up in an arc
then returns it to the curb with a thump,
earning an excited Zee! from the highchair,
from this lovely boy, the son of our son,
his eyes wide at this world
he doesn’t yet have the words to describe.
Full Circle
Our mini fridge arrives today and we must find room
in this postage-stamp space we call the kitchen:
our old dining room table crammed with tea kettle
and toaster beside a squat cupboard that wobbles.
A space not that much smaller than the tiny bungalow
we were elated to find when we were first married,
three rooms with a view of the harbor.
We furnished it with your roll top desk, floor pillows,
and a wine barrel table we placed by the window.
So many meals around that little table, candles lit,
Schubert on the stereo, a habit we took with us
to the Victorian house we bought after our daughter
was born. the mini-ranch in Montana, the gated
retirement village in the South,
even here, in this two-family house, squeezing
things in, making it home.
“Appraisal,” “The White Pelicans of Oregon,” and “Zee” are from Ordinary Splendor (MoonPath Press, 2022)
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