My mother died twenty years ago the first week in August. Typing "twenty years ago" was a shock as it doesn't seem that long ago.
She was an artist and teacher of French and Spanish and of fine arts and art history. Mom also loved to travel.
Here she is in a medieval village
in Languedoc in southern France.
The poem I wrote about this photo was published earlier in August in Bourgeon Magazine
at bourgerononline.com
This is the poem:
Walking Away
Languedoc
The gate is open, the pebbled path
between weathered stone walls, old,
and Mother is walking away.
In the middle distance,
a chiseled-brick archway
over a lane that's long been dusty
as no wind has come along
lively enough to sweep back
and forth between the aged houses.
Mother's a tourist in this region
where, if a person said Yes
in the vernacular of the troubadours
and radically Christian Cathars
rather than in the Parisian patois
used by invading northern nobility,
she might've been marked for death,
along with entire families and towns,
slain by bonfire or the sword.
Mother's been able to say Yes
in a handful of languages.
Yes, to marriage, to children
and to a dynamic accumulation
of days and, lately, Yes
to whatever waits ahead.
The breathless blue sky
above the down-sloping village's
hillside and its castle in ruins
are nowhere in view. Only the walls,
the open gate and the path on which
Mother is walking away.
---- by Lenny Lianne
Rest In Peace: Elizabeth (Lysie) Banigan Iddings
1924 - 2002
