Placemats

First of all, I try to never write a poem over 100 words, and this one comes in at 283! and its more of a short story, a rememberance of a summer afternoon nearly 60 years ago. more of a short story than a poem, but my wife says its a poem, so here it is, in its too long self:

Mrs. Dan brought us lemonade

and sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

We ate at the long table, inside.

The long table outside

was covered with stoneware churns,

converted into wine vats,

with balloons for venting without contamination.

Her name wasn’t Mrs. Dan.

She was Alexandra Welchel,

the second wife of my godfather’s.

I didn’t know his first wife,

he had her locked in a sanitarium

for being insane, divorced,

and then remarried,

all before I was born.

Only later did I know

of the first Mrs. Welchel,

through his sad retelling

of her story,

or his version of it.

Mr. Dan was a great man,

a mentor to my father,

a great story teller

with a barrel of a laugh.

An all American football player

from nineteen severteen,

a former klansman,

but none of this

did I know

sitting at the table

with placemats.

We never used placemats

on our Formica

dinette from Sears

My mother did not approve of wine

or winemaking,

but we were

never taught to condemn

anything either

of the Dan’s did.

We lived our summers

for free

in their beautiful guest cottage

while daddy worked on pecans

in the Mississippi river delta.

Mrs. Dan’s family rented

the same house in Amsterdam

for three hundred years,

she showed us pictures

of the house that afternoon.

My mother adored her,

and called her Alexandra,

which confused me,

because we, my brother and I,

called her Mrs. Dan.

She was that mix

of sweet and stern,

so common in older ladies

in the south,

giving us a jigsaw puzzle

to play with,

yet reminding us to keep

our voices down,

and keep our glasses

of lemonade on the placemats.