(for Ashley Just and Kevin Just)

The kids are really putting their backs
into it—my nephew, who, with his wife,
are working hard to make the old house theirs,

clearing a half-century’s worth of overgrown
front yard and remaking it anew with slender
bender board and lots of shredded black bark.

It makes me smile and teary every time I see
them out there, not unlike our parents nearly
six decades ago, bending and planting, Dad
going after poison oak, Mom planting camellias.

Today the kids set out a half dozen pittosporum
plants in their black pots, ready for the freshly
de-rooted soil under the windows of what were
my sister’s and my childhood bedrooms.

Sitting on the floor of my sister’s room, going
through piles of our late mother’s sheet music,
I see their baseball-hatted heads popping up,
then disappearing, as they bend and plant.

Later, after we all return to our respective
homes in three different cities, my sister texts:
It takes a family to rehab a home.

I add, Exactly—the newer generations
of the family to rehab the family home.
Especially the yard duty couple.

And my nephew texts back: We are happy
to bear that weight on our useful lower
backs with ample cartilage!

I paste a happy red heart
on that text, a tiny metaphor for
my very own.