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March 21, 2025: Ann Richmond Garrett, "A Mantle of Antlers"
A Mantle of Antlers
by: Ann Richmond Garrett
When you watch your husband shoota red squirrel off the roof,remember? How you once believedyou were made only to watch city lights come uplike a tide each night? And in the morning riseto follow the scent of bread, in thin October air?There’s comfort in how that placewill go on without you, a continuum untended.Unlike the shingles here that need mending,or garden box you couldn’t bring yourself to weed,where–as summer moved–the beardtongue drowned in switchgrass.There’s a way your grandmother knew this too:as a girl, sent with cash on Michigan Avefor takeout and cigarettes. Her steps rang new,electric. In afternoons she stole awayto films with her Oma. They whispered in German,at ease in multitudes.She left Chicago for a garden in the northto tend while her husband worked,children running feral in the scrub. Some nights,letting white sheets go chilled on the lineshe walked the orchard’s edge,envisioning her city’s vista and its lottery.How could either of you have predicted you would learnto hold in one hand saccharine refrains of hermitage,and in the other, a weight of everything that still needs be done?You’re unsure how anyone knows this innately,or comes to grasp it, unlike the way both your bodies knewhow to weave through streets of strangers, dancing easyto aimless music drifting through ether, like chances made only for you.As you stand barefoot on the rough hewn porch,a broad winged hawk shrieks through gloaming pines.You think of the night your grandmother found a dying buckin the orchard, alone, kept vigil with him in the loosened earth.She would keep the antlers, saying it was as if a mantle had been passed.
Ann Richmond Garrett is a writer from Northern Lower Michigan. By day she works at the Peter White Library, in Marquette, and spends the rest of her time cooking, dog wrangling, running, and professing her undying love for Roget’s Thesaurus to anyone who will listen. She is a Yooper.
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Yes! "to hold in one hand saccharine refrains of hermitage,
ReplyDeleteand in the other, a weight of everything that still needs be done?"