(Noun: Music. A more or less independent passage at the end
of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.)

Neither my sister nor I thought it was important,
but the family photographer did, wanting to

take photos of us in the now-empty house
where we grew up, the one that, beginning today,

will be taken apart Humpty Dumpty-style and remade
anew for the next generation. And so we gathered,

we two girls, one silver-haired, one perennially golden,
to sit on the sky blue carpet in front of the fireplace

one last time—the room where we’d watch TV,
where I’d lie on the floor, and she’d sit on my back,

tickling me, prompting Mom to chuckle and holler,
Donna, quit tickling your sister! which made both

tickler and ticklee laugh harder, and Dad, too.
Where we posed for Christmas card photos sitting

on the raised hearth, the room that was the center
of family goings-on, including the matriarch’s departure

not quite three months ago. So we two sixty-somethings
posed for one of our beloved men as the other looked on,

none of us yet knowing that the next day it would all
begin to disappear, as it all morphs into pure memory.

We are happy about that. Really, we are. And the two
who bought this place in 1966 would be, too.

But still, as I look at the final photos in the house of us,
the coda to the long symphony of us, the last notes

dying away, a tiny piece of me rises inside, crying,
Encore! Encore! wishing, impossibly, for more.

•••

Our deepest thanks and love to our guys—Dick Schmidt and Eric Just—for their
decades of devotion and support, particularly in the last year of our mother’s life.