We have the best conversations now that she’s dead.

She’s become a much better listener.

I talk to her when I am alone in her house
sorting through her things. I try not to say,
“Why do you have so many…?”

Because there are so many… of everything.

I don’t think of her as a hoarder
so much as an archivist, if not a thoughtful one.
She’d just shove things farther back in drawers
or cupboards and closets and forget them.

So now my sister and I dig through the archaeology
of our childhoods, unearthing treasures long forgotten.

“You kept these?” I ask my mother, as I finger
two pink plastic curlers rolling around like puppies
in one of the small drawers in what she called
“the girls’ bathroom.”

She does not respond, and I know the answer.

She did not so much keep them as forget about them,
and it turns out that finding these old bones,
trinkets of who we once were,

might just be the greatest delight in this untangling of a life.