Elsewhere

by Alexis Schaitkin

Her attention drew ours to those details of our town so familiar we had long ago ceased to appreciate them. With nothing but her presence she altered our familiar spaces around her.

Seeing home again thru eyes of a stranger

We felt her vanishing like a thread cut loose, presence turned to absence.

*

But once a mother went, we saw it, something out of balance in the nature of her love for her children that set her apart.

Afflicted Mothers commonalities

these older women went all but unnoticed. They had managed to pass through their period of greatest vulnerability safely and had arrived on the other side of it only to find that now nobody cared about them or what they did.

Ah, to be old : ignored; invisible