Author’s Note: This poem is about my beautiful and courageous 81-year-old grandmother, whose two younger brothers - Calvin and Drenon - both died on the same day in 1928. Calvin was 3, and Drenon was 1 1/2. Thank you, Mawmaw, for never letting their memory die.

Memories of Calvin and Drenon

She stands alone in a stray patch of sunlight

Eyes wistful with the memories of distant times

Memories evoked by the tiny shoes she held in her hand -

Crusted with mud from long ago mud puddles

The dirt of a small Texas homestead

Where a little family lived and loved

Down through the years.

The shoes she held once belonged to a little boy

A small child looking ahead to the future he’d never know.

Two boys, two girls - the perfect family

Until illness came unbidden, entered without knocking

And, within a few hours, bore both boys away

On the breath of the night.

The sun has risen many times since then -

There’s been pain and love, laughter and tears

But her memories remain; she keeps them in a special place

Brings them out sometimes, to show to others

Tiny pieces of lives too precious to be forgotten

She smiles as she speaks of the little brothers

Who left when she was almost too small to remember.

Life must go on; there are things to do

She steps outside, closing the door on a thousand memories

Leaving a shed that seems somehow haunted

By the tiny, muddy shoes of little boys who played in the rain.