Not things. She does not have things to leave.
A woman who worked every day of her adult life in the kind of work that does not compound, that does not accumulate into property or portfolios or the kind of inheritance that arrives in envelopes from lawyers and changes the mathematics of a life. What she has to leave is not that kind of thing and I want to say clearly that this is not a complaint, that I am not writing this poem from inside resentment, that the accounting of what she does not have is not where the weight of this is.
The weight is in what she does have to leave.
The stubbornness. I inherited the stubbornness and I used to call it something else but now I call it what it is, which is the refusal to be smaller than the situation requires, the refusal to stop when stopping feels like giving up, the particular digging-in of a woman who has been told no enough times to have developed a relationship with no that is more curiosity than capitulation. She taught me that without teaching it, by being it, by modeling an entire life in which the no was not the final word.
The laugh. I inherited the laugh that starts before the joke is finished because she always knows where the joke is going and she finds it funny before it arrives. I have the same laugh. My daughter has it too. Three generations of women laughing before the punchline, in advance of the funny, ahead of it, which is another way of saying: trusting that the funny is coming. That is not nothing. That is a disposition. That is a way of being in the world that says: I expect delight. I have always expected delight. The delight has not always arrived but the expecting of it has kept me oriented toward it and that orientation has saved me more than once.
And the hands. I already told you about the hands.
The hands that are hers at the sink. The hands I will leave in turn to whoever comes after me, carrying whatever the hands carry, the specific cellular memory of women who worked and held and made things and kept going and sometimes stood at the window with the coffee going cold and looked out at whatever was there and found it, for a moment, sufficient.
This is what she leaves. This is what I am already giving away.
