Roma Lambert Mortensen is a retired nurse, teacher, and massage therapist. What refused to retire is her love of the written word. Starting in her late teens and ebbing and flowing between her childhood on the farm, her professions, and raising three children, her words streamed into poetry. Five years ago she joined the Otter Creek Poets and was encouraged to publish her first book: The Unclear Pool of Remember. Roma and her husband of over fifty years live in rural Vermont surrounded by fields and woods. For several years, they have been visiting elderly people in the community (currently via Zoom) to bring them music and song.
I was lucky to be given the gift of Roma’s book recently, and I was soon immersed in the fragments of her memories of growing up and growing old on a farm in Vermont. It’s a memoir in poems, and there is something dreamlike about the way details tumble forth, but our attentive Roma is present from childhood on, observing and documenting, viewing life with the wonder it is due. As the introduction states, “They [the poems] tell an incomplete story of people, places, and times that have fragmented into memories. But without these fragments, the people, places, and times would cease to exist at all.”
And that’s why I asked permission to share a couple of the poems here on the Living Stories Collective. It seemed so very consistent with what we strive to do: capturing stories before they vanish into forgetting, keeping alive the people we have known and loved, and seeking to retrieve wisdom from days gone by that might be useful now.
Transformations
My Scottish grandmother fashioned
Intricate and colorful hand-sewn quilts
In patterns like baskets and butterfly wings. The
Cloth scraps were gleaned from Mom’s sewing
Sprees of blouses and skirts to lure sister and me
Out of comfortable farm clothes.
On sunny-summer Monday mornings Mom
Arranged wet laundry on the lawn to bleach.
Limp, worn towels and sullen washcloths,
grayish barn-socks and kitchen dish-towels
spotted with blueberry, grape and tomato were
stretched out on the grass forming
a patchwork pattern bordered by green.
By afternoon I was sent to the backyard
To fetch the sun-dry items.
Surprised, I paused. On the grass
under the kitchen window was a flock
of cloth butterflies with wings, showing
faded food-pattern tidbits and bodies, formerly
gray, now sunbathed toward dazzle.
My young hands folded cloth butterflies
And took sweet-smelling summer into our home.
Inspired, I picked up notebook, pen, sat at
my German grandmother’s tiny desk searching
for verse to create poetic wings.
Olfactory Ocean
Like Mom’s delicious beef-bone soup
gathered leftover vegetables,
Our family’s farm kitchen gathered odors.
Barn, cow, and faded manure scent wafted
from a waterfall of well-used jackets,
shirts, and hats which casually cascaded
from a line of steel coat hooks stretching from
behind the back door to the captain’s chair with
its worn-to-shiny seat and arms.
Floor cradled dry and drying footwear which
gathered around two coal-furnace vents,
who merrily broadcast like ocean spray
smells from all items within heat reach.
Harvest weeks added dusky-sweet perfume
from hay-chaff or fresh-cut corn stocks,
or later the worked tang of corn silage.
Clean-up days had the sharp alert of Pine-Sol
on wet linoleum or the bite of bleach
lingering around Mom’s gray wringer-washer.
Rolling in from the daily wave of meals
was the aroma of Mom’s creations:
fresh spareribs in her secret BBQ sauce, mouth-
watering clover-leaf cinnamon buns, or salt
pork caressed by spicy bubbling yellow-eye
beans baked on low all day, witness to many
covert taste tests.
Older, I ride with friends past a farm
And listen to derisive remarks about the smell
Coming from behind a spreader and tractor.
I smile. A beloved vision floats in:
Our farm, Mom’s fragrant kitchen, and
Our family gathered around the dinner table.
A slice of warm, savory homemade bread
is in my hand, and Mom with shining eyes
passes me her wild strawberry jam.
Get It Done
Get the hay in before it rains.
Get barn chores done before breakfast.
Get the cows. Milking starts at 5 p.m. sharp.
Barefoot I gallop from the barn
on my pretend horse,
gitty up, gitty up,
down the farm-field road,
dip under the one rail gate,
and ride past the prickly bushes.
At the top of the hill I stop.
below me cow paths wind between rock,
stone, daisies, buttercups,
and occasional anthill.
Come booooss,
I walk halfway down the hill.
Come booooss. Come booooss.
Down by the swamp two, three
Black and white heads lift.
Come booooss.
The old Holstein with the broken horn
starts toward the hill. The rest
follow in ragged columns of cow.
They plod up the worn paths.
Behind, I urge them faster.
A frisky trouble-maker breaks rank.
I dash across the hill after her
and trip, fall, pain, tears.
My reddening toe bends in,
starts to swell. More tears.
Finally I’m up, limp after the cows.
They’re milling at the gate. I open it.
They file into the barnyard and then barn.
I stumble in, see Dad,
white grain-store hat brim
Work-brown and wet-rimmed.
Sweat drips from his chin onto his
bare chest, hair flecked with dirt, chaff.
He looks up, brow furrowed. You’re late.
Readers who would like to order a copy of The Unclear Pool of Remember can do so here.