My Umbrella

By Marian Glaser © September 2004

Pictures are original embroideries done by my mother

My hospital room holds three of my mother’s many embroideries.

Others hang in bigger houses. My life is in this room.

One embroidery shows a small boy and girl sheltered

under a huge green umbrella. I can’t see it without remembering

the Dutch poem (probably heard in my distant Dutch childhood)

about a brother and sister who borrow mother’s umbrella and

have to fight the wind to return it safely.

Each stitch made by her eighty-nine year old fingers

testifies to a love that reaches through the pain

of my lost independence. The buses I traveled on

to visit her are now impossible for me

but the spirit that creates beauty is here, comforting.

Other gifts, including plants, carvings, poems, cards,

embroideries and photographs, shower love from others

until I feel bathed in it, a part of distant scenes

so different from my present.

Hers is special. It speaks of her wish to

shield, guard, love.