And then the final poem today.
This is my-- the anniversary of my mom's death.
And my mom died at the top of Mount Lemmon.
And it's a happy day.
It's not a sad day.
It's a happy day for me.
And she died in 2001, which was another fantastic wildflower
year.
A year of much rain and when the wildflowers
were all over the place.
And my mom had been in a home for--
in an adult care home for about five years.
The last year and a half of her life
she was paralyzed from the neck down.
And so my sisters and I decided to take her.
She was dying.
And we decided that she wouldn't like to die inside.
So we gave her a bath and we put her
in her most beautiful orange dress, and put on her jewelry,
and we drove her to the top of Mount Lemmon where she died.
And we were happy that she didn't
have to die in a hospital room or in hospice.
She was outside and she loved being outside.
So this poem is called "Housecleaning."
And you might wonder why in the heck
are you calling it house cleaning.
You just lost your mother.
My mom was a terrible housekeeper, but--
oh, well.
[CHUCKLES]
And it's not about-- this is what women do.
When women get nervous they clean house, like crazy.
I mean, they go crazy.
And it's like they were scrubbing everything, right?
Oh God, your love left you.
Oh my God.
The kid-- the stove, you take the stove apart
and you're cleaning under the burners,
and you scrubbing your skin off.
And this is what we do.
We're trying to clean the universe.
[CHUCKLES] "Housekeeping."
So it starts with a vacuum cleaner.
For my sisters.
"How comforting the animal suck of the vacuum that
creates order from the chaos of a bad news
call in the middle of the night.
Upright Kirby or Electrolux pulled like a Conestoga
on rubber wheels, it doesn't matter,
as long as the hose lies cozy as a lifeboat
or locked in the hand that scans a hardwood
floor for dust motes.
Or nozzles into the deep napped scalp of wall to wall.
My aunt hated housework.
Disdained the vacuums grinding grisly roar
rattling her ear rings interrupting her daily soaps.
So we were afraid to eat in her house.
Once stepped over a dead dog."
This is true.
"Once stepped over a dead dog my cousin said
was sleeping on the barn floor.
I knew a woman who swept her floor naked,
bosom shaking like two jumbo bags of oatmeal as she laughed.
It's my house, damn it.
And anyone who doesn't like it can always get married."
[LAUGHTER]
You can't make that up.
"Before their divorce my sister's
husband bought a carpet cleaner.
The green machine became obsessed with getting out
the deeper dirt in berber carpets he'd installed.
Spent weeks shampooing and sweeping instead of
writing blues songs that rang inside memories
of his own father beating the tempo of anger into his head.
The times my mother's mania dilated the red tide
in her eyes she wailed day and night
and lost the urge to clean anything.
So us kids learned housekeeping as a manual to save our lives.
We scrubbed, and swept, and polished
until there was no visible evidence of her neglect.
Grandma kept her house immaculate
as the lilac laced handkerchief she
stuffed in the hip pocket of her house dress.
I remember galvanized buckets of rainwater
she collected to wash her silver hair.
The lemon smell of oak and mahogany after she dusted.
She advised, don't work as hard as I did.
Scrubbing floors bends your back like birch.
Follow what your heart says, dance.
Before my mother died we bathed her, washed her hair,
slipped on her best orange flowered dress.
Ruby ring, pearl necklace.
My sister carried her comatose to my newly washed car.
I drove and all three of us daughters
teased one another as if we were teens.
Told her jokes about men who fell out of trees raking
leaves.
Told only sweet memories.
Climbing 7,000 feet of slow switchbacks,
past Meadows rocketed by the flaming tongues
of California poppies.
Desert boulders cracked by eons of sunstroke and wind.
Passed lizard, coyote, hummingbird were, and hawk.
Passed waxy prickly pear, and ocotillo bloom.
Up finally, to ponderosa pines and juniper's.
All the way to the top of Mount Lemmon where
the hoop of her dusky breath slowed enough for her
to leap clean through."
Thank you so very much.
And all my friends, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]