Free Verse: Growing Older

One thinks for a moment

At the beginning

That life will be orchestras playing at weddings

Cake and bridesmaids’ bouquets

Nights a little tipsy

Or filled with hallucinations of a garden of stuffed animals

The roar of an expressway like a waterfall in the distance.

Driving in cars to airports

To pick up luggage filled with grass.

Boys who want to run their hands up your leg.

Sweet kisses, deep and filled with longing

And lust.

One thinks this will last forever.

Enjoy being young, we are told.

We can see the physical changes.

The bodies grown wrinkled,

A bit stooped,

Slower, a bit musty.

But it’s not the body changes that dim the orchestra

And the street lamps wetly off the pavement.

One stares with far-off eyes into an unknown distance

Wondering where the others went who came before

And wandering off darkling into the everylasting night.

We’ve heard the orchestra before

Danced our dances.

No more young men who want to run their hands up my legs.

No more sweet kisses that last until dawn.

Only night.

Only the fading strains of the orchestra that is getting ready to pack its gear.

Celebrate, It's Not Too Late

My mother, Helen D. Sefcovic, loved the holidays.

Her coat closet was filled with wreaths, decorated for all the holidays. Each was kept in pristine condition on its own hanger with a bag pulled over the top to keep off dust.

There were kitchen mats for all the holidays and seasons. Rolled, they filled a very large shopping bag.

Kitchen towels also celebrated with motifs of summer, fall, winter, spring and all the special occasions therein.

She wasn't a great cook, but her wonderful sense of style and beauty expressed itself with fashion and decorating.

Until she became too old and weak, she always decorated the outside of her apartment building with Christmas plants and decorations for the pine tree out front.

Her upstairs porch was hung with big red bows or other appropriate holiday decorations.

One of the last times we sat together when she still had geraniums on the porch, a hummingbird visited her plant several times. It was the first time I had ever seen a hummingbird.

When we were little, the Nativity scene was surrounded with a village lit by colored lights.

Photo circa 1960, the village surrounded by wooden fence; me holding the ill-fated Tavvy McTavish who developed an incurable kidney condition.

The lights were concealed beneath glittering cotton snow paper. Mountains were constructed of shoe boxes and rolled up newspaper and tissue for the lead skiers.

There were two ponds with ice skaters. One was very old chipped mirrors. The chips made them all the more beautiful and loved.

Some of the figurines were so old, they were paper mache, not lead. These dated to World War II and the metal shortage.

There were even two doughboys from World War I with rusted round helmets.


The houses also were paper. Some were well constructed, some were cheap, and there was an orange church with a spire. I especially remember one home that looked like stucco with California style arched windows.

Surrounding all was an old Lionel train set on the wide tracks.

Our home, a rented apartment except for about three years just before my father died, glowed with warm colors for the Christmas and New Year's holiday.

In the old days, visiting lasted until Epiphany on January 6th. Relatives traveled to each other's homes in the evenings, packing the family into winter coats, rubber galoshes, mittens, and mufflers. Of course, TV was in its infancy in those days and not the center of our lives. It functioned only in the evenings and only on three networks.

I loved the Christmas village and took it when I got married. I crawled around on the floor and tried to recreate the magic my mother had made for us.

When my husband and I split up and I took off for New Orleans, the decorations were in boxes in the basement of the old hippie house when a pipe burst.

My best friend and my husband acted afraid to tell me the bad news when I got back: some of the village's paper houses had been ruined.

That was the beginning of the end of the village.

A few years later, I sustained a back injury in a mugging and could no longer crawl around the floor.

Still, I lugged the village wherever I went. I set up the Nativity scene and what houses I could where there was space on a mantle or shelf.

One of the last times I set up the entire scene, Athens, GA, during the early 1990s.

Then, even that became too much and I gave all the bottle brush trees, figurines, ponds, and houses to a library.

Now that Mother is gone, I wish I had kept a few of the best ones and the Nativity scene.

This is my first Christmas without my mother.

I went to Mexico and had Christmas with a lovely bunch of people who I shall probably never see again. I saw a hummingbird in one of the trees, and it reminded me of one of the last afternoons I spent with her.

I run away from the holidays, but my mother embraced them until the end.

RIP, Helen D. Sefcovic, I love you and miss you.

Recipes Tell the Story of A Life

Most people save photographs.

I’ve kept a journal for some years.

A charming little book, Love, Loss, and What I Wore, documents a life with clothing. I gave that one to several friends and now, years later, it's a play.

I was caught unawares when culling and sorting my recipes turned into another route to Memory Lane.

Some of the earliest recipes are hand-written by people who no longer or rarely make the old Polish dishes.

Sandy Dykeman's banana cake recipe reminded me of high school and our early college time. I haven't seen her or made the recipe in decades. But I cannot throw it out, for I have no photos of her, and it is a memory worth having every once in a while.

Some of the recipes are from Cosmopolitan, the 1970s bible of liberated young career women. Sandy and I tried many of these. A recipe for shrimp, smothered in fresh summer tomatoes and goat cheese, is one I still use from time to time.

One of my early jobs in newspaper was typing recipes. Of those I saved, the paper has turned brown, and sometimes the letters have faded so nearly indistinct.

Here's a recipe for chicken cacciatore I made the first time I had my husband over for dinner. He was living with another woman, and she came too. I did not see our love affair coming. The memories are sprinkled with stardust. That recipe stays.

Quite a few recipes are from the healthy recipe books a Baltimore friend and I used. I remember bringing my own containers to buy different kinds of flour, rice, and yeast from tubs at the Sikh health food store. Is it still there, I wonder? I am pretty sure that the bins probably are no more.

Saturday was a wonderful day to visit the Baltimore markets, come home with my booty, drink wine, cook, and entertain. Many of these recipes are stained with ingredients from those times long past.

A few recipes are from gourmet cooking school. Reporters are no longer allowed to accept such freebies, but I learned a lot.

Some of these are keepers, especially the salad dressings.

I was wondering as I sorted through these if I had ever allowed myself the luxury of walnut oil for a salad dressing. I think I must try it, however expensive it may be. Then I see a notation of a Baltimore supermarket where I obviously bought it. I remember now, I tried it, and I was not as impressed as perhaps I ought to be.

Here are the recipes I cooked when we were poor – lots of beans and tortillas and casseroles and very little meat. There are some good soup and stew recipes among this lot, things I cook now and again.

There are recipes for things I no longer eat – veal and pork. A growing collection of salad and vegetable recipes as my preference has gone in that direction. I begged for the antipasto salad when I was a girl and my family sent out for pizza. I don't know where that craving came from, among my meat-and-potatoes relatives. I still embrace vegetables and increasingly the world does, too.

Sometimes I wonder at why I kept a recipe. Do I really need a instructions to make deviled eggs? Or herb chicken? These are dumped.

I haven't need instructions to whip up easy dishes -- pasta, omelettes, steak -- since the 1970s. It's always been about what's in the cupboard and what goes with what. I get two or three recipes for a dish from my cookbooks or the internet, compare the ingredients, and decide how I will do it. This comes from those years of typing recipes. I quickly saw that certain things go with other things and the many variations of a single dish. Perhaps I also have been blessed with a keen sense of smell. That helps, too.

I continue sorting and culling the dishes of times past, memories of people I have loved drifting through my fingers like fairy dust.