When You Were Thirteen

When You Were Thirteen

Debbie Sawczak

After the storm there were tall snow mountains
in the mall parking lot
from the plow.
We were on foot, crunching home
in the dark and burning cold
from A&P.
You thrust your shopping bag at me
sprinted off
scrambled up a crisp slope
(always my Tenzing
climbing everything that had height!)
leapt up at the summit and whirled in the moonlight;
waved, laughed loud
while I stood below on the glistening pavement
wreathed in the glow of your echoes listening

and remembering how at twenty-one months
you hung between life and death in the Burn Unit
after another, more terrible climb;
the basin of boiling water on the picnic table
that day in our campsite
and all the ensuing havoc.

Someone once said
The pain then
is part of the joy now.

You must have seen that pain-sweetened joy
in my face:
plunged down your snow alp
pink-cheeked and panting
and asked me
what being a mother felt like.

I had to pause
and steady my voice to answer.

---

Debbie Sawczak
Poet

Debbie Sawczak is an Ontario poet whose work appears in In A Strange Land: Introducing Ten Kingdom Poets (Poiema/Cascade) and in such publications as The McMaster Journal of Theology & Ministry.

Photography by Mike LVC