Carol Pearce-Worthington

we are not to sing in the car

remembering her...
sister around a corner
where she never was before

The holts sell their Wisconsin farm the apple tree is cut down to make way for more corn the cows pigs chickens gone along with mrs. holt's chicken voice as she scatters seed in their yard and calls here chickchickchick and roosters and hens alike come running in the holt yard chickens go where they please but they respond to mrs. holt and her dried corn flying over the dirt the grass and them pecking at it and shep the collie noble beside the straight tall figure of holt himself bringing in the cows at dusk from a pasture down a way and across the road past the stand alone rural mail boxes the pigpen with sows nursing piglets and crows the windmill turning to spew water from deep below so it splashes out bright cold immediately drinkable with a dipper into the bucket.

Holts name their first daughter after my sister who has a sprig cut from that apple tree growing at her farm in Missouri as far from Wisconsin as she got and small as it is it still bears apples! She bakes a pie made from the holts tree now holding its own and nesting birds and weathering rains in Missouri and I taste it.

her separate life
occasionally she visits
my dreams