We’ve had a summer of grown children. Grandchildren, not so many this year. They have jobs, they’re obligated. They all assure us they’ll be back next summer, they miss the lake, they miss us. They mean it, but they’re setting up their lives, starting new jobs, coaching in summer field hockey camp.
So this poem by Olivia Stiffler appealed to me. I’m feeling the shift especially this year, the “move to the back seat,” as she puts it. It’s a simple poem that travels naturally from leaving to coming back in a different way, barely back, focused on the future.
I think part of what drew me to this poem is its ordinariness. Much life is mundane, but when we look closely, the mundane is exactly where the beauty is. The hand holding our hands, but not in the same way as before. Barely holding, their minds already about to drift off like helium balloons. The story of this poem is not my story. Seldom does a poem tell exactly our own story. But pieces of it can suggest what we feel. An image can trigger so many emotions. The feeling of the “growing list of the missing,” for example, of being lightly held, these days, by the present.
That’s what can happen. But the poem itself wants to be heard as itself, also. This one tells its own story and wants to be heard in its own language.
Stiffler lives in the Low Country of South Carolina, a landscape wholly unlike the hills of Missouri where she grew up. She spent most of her work life as a free-lance stenotype reporter. “It’s all language, she says, but a different approach to language. You’re always listening.” Among her southern neighbors, she also mentions, are “a plethora of snakes, water fowl, alligators, and an occasional panther.” She has two collections of poems, “Hiding in Plain Sight,” and “Otherwise We Are Safe.” Garrison Keillor read “Grandchildren” on Sept. 16, 2014, on The Writer’s Almanac.