Little Leaf Literary Journal

by Ann Marie Potter

When I was young, every year on the first of June
my mother would pack the car. Sunhats, pillows,
Excedrin, stomach medicine, phenobarbital and laxatives. 
Double checking for her prescription sunglasses,
carrying her well-used Rand-McNally like a Bible,
she would herd my sisters and I into the last crannies of usable space.
“We’re off!” she’d proclaim, wiggling her hand in the direction of my
father’s tractor. Even at ten, I knew she had a different gesture in mind.

Off to Gettysburg to count cannonballs and pigeon droppings
on the bronze shoulder of William W. Wells.
South to watch the glassblowers in Colonial Williamsburg,
on to Newport News to eat antipasto and scallops at Nick’s.
Stunning ourselves with the mountain views in Gatlinburg and Wolf Creek Pass,
we’d go for broke and end up, somewhat worse for wear, in Amarillo, Texas. 
After Palo Duro Canyon and the Panhandle Plains Museum, we’d visit the skeleton
of the old Air Force base and watch the sheep graze in the room where I was born. 

“Go West, young man!” my mother would shout, somehow forgetting that 
California was fraught with difficult memories: a loaded shotgun my mother 
pointed at her own head: a childhood spent in peach orchards and misery. 
A mother obsessed with bowel movements and a father with wandering hands. 
And years later, her own dead child. But, as always, Monterey was our salvation.
We’d wander from store to store on the wharf, tapping the glass aquariums.
We’d prowl the tide pools beneath the pier, where Doc had lived in
my imagination, and where John Steinbeck had stolen my second grade heart. 

And then it would come, as predictable as mosquito season: my mother’s need 
to shore up the family myth. With the determination of a pioneer woman, she
would drive us around the back roads of Salinas, pointing out the migrant camps.
Then it was on to the Big Rez to stare at half-naked Navajo children and chindi-
infested hogans. Finally, on our way to the Mason-Dixon, we’d travel the back
roads of the deep South, in search of the share-cropper’s shack. Just so she could say,
once more with feeling, “You see, you girls don’t have it so bad after all!” And we’d head 
back to Pennsylvania, to help my father with the hay and count the days till the first of June.

Ann Marie Potter has officially retired from academic life and currently lives in Wyoming, spoiling the family cats, dressing in sloppy clothes, and watching the mule deer eat the flowers in my front yard. Her poetry has been published in The Storyteller, Thirteen Myna Birds, and Velvet Antler. She’s not sure that “enjoy” is the proper verb for her poems, but she hopes they resonate with someone.