Tin foil
The dishes were finished and stacked.
I rinsed and folded into quarters the aluminum foil I’d used for dinner
in a fit of geometric eco-responsibility.
It flashed a memory of my mother doing the same thing 45 or more years earlier
her reuse of the tin foil as she ALWAYS called it,
a product of the depression (Ireland’s was chronic) and war, that was chronic too,
of want and scarcity rather than of concerns about biodegradation,
landfill use and water table contamination.
Still, standing, holding the sheet that dripped some water beads into the sink,
our memories met on the surface of the foil now
crinkly clean like the Spring ice on a lake and not on a rink that’s been Zambonized.
The dining room table set – Sunday dinner –
a mid-afternoon tableaux of a functional, not perfect, life
a solid tasty meal, charged conversations about politics and religion,
not sex or money, and finished with a clean up
where re-using something that wasn’t broken or finished was the norm
long before I brought that "new idea" home from a Boy Scout meeting or
before it became vogue or ultimately the dusty detritus of thrift shops
their shelves filled to overflowing with castoff stuff from those who survive and
who already have stuff to overflowing and who can’t bring themselves to simply
throw it out along with fading memories of past imperfect.
