(in memory of Nell Lester)

At the end of the afternoon
we three stand on the small deck
overlooking the unfenced yard that
yawns into a green swath of trees,
as Sue, after filling the big feeder,
also spreads a thick seed ribbon
across the deck for the birds.

Her mother kept the birds fed—
at their lakeside house next to ours
where we all grew up, and this one,
her last, in the foothills—and Sue
shows up a few times a week
to continue the tradition.

The birds don’t realize that
the nice lady who fed them flew
into mystery nine months ago, that
her tall daughter who offers them
sustenance does this as kindness
of wildlife as well as in tribute to
the one who fed her, who fed us all,

with homemade holey bread that
peanut butter adhered to like glue
and jelly fell through—along with
endless rounds of hefty cookies and
tuna and noodle casserole, which
still defines comfort food for me.

We three sisters under the skin—
who grew up next door to each other,
who walked to the bus stop and
Girl Scout’d and played in the band
together—gather as 60-somethings
to pull books off Sue’s mother’s shelves,
crack them open like time capsules
to discover tucked-in notes and delight
in flyleaf inscriptions in the hand
of the dearly departed.

Empty boxes fill; keepers find
their way to an emptied set of shelves.
Treasures emerge—her own neatly typed
poems, a tiny French dictionary that
Sue, age seven, inscribed in 1964 to her
mother, whose high school graduation
photo we pass from hand to hand to hand.

We three, who would not know her
till years later, admire this young woman’s
dark hair and shining eyes, her future
stretching ahead of her, this one who
loved birds and raised one of us to fledge
and fly, the one who, in so many ways,
helped the girls from Granite Oaks Drive
become the us,

the we who endure to this day.