Nellie

She was the waft of lavender
growing by the front door,
a squirt of lily of the valley,
and the breezy scent of washing day.

She was a little cockney sparrer
greeting everyone by their moniker,
trilling songs from the good old days
as she polished and flicked dust away.

She was the rumble of her shopping trolley
on the broken pavements, an ice lolly
from the tinkling ice cream van,
and a sooty kiss from the coal man.

She was a biscuit with the cuppa
for the fortnightly window cleaner,
carrots and apples for the horses
that drew the carts and old-time hearses.

She was skeins of the softest wool
wound from my hands into a ball –
knitter of cardigans and seamstress rare,
wearer of scarves to cover her hair.

Kim M. Russell, 24th January 2022

Sarah is our host at the dVerse Poets Pub for this Tuesday’s Poetics, where she is serving ’verbs and nouns on tap, images still and sparkling’.  She tells us that today is her grandmother’s birthday and, if she were still alive, she’d be 107. It would have been my grandmother’s birthday tomorrow, 25th January, born 1912 and died 1997, she would have been 111.

Sarah says that grandmas come in many shapes and sizes and mine was just like hers, ‘plump and irreverent… a great cook, she laughed a lot, cried at sad films… Nobody ever made pastry as well as her.’

Our challenge is to write about grannies, those older women who support us and nurture us, perhaps spoil us a little, but reserve the right to tell us off. I am a grandmother, and my grandson calls me Nanny as I did mine. I have written a lot about my grandmother and here is another poem in her honour.

Advertisement

37 thoughts on “Nellie”

    1. Thank you, Laura. She knew everyone. Wherever we went she would greet people. She pretty much brought me up until I was seven, and she stopped my mother running off to Australia with my half sister’s father.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  10. Hoe I love this -and the prompt – for meeting so many wonderful grannies. Yours sounds wonderful. I always associate with the scet of flowers from my Grandma’s garden with those days, too. Sweet pea and lilac……hollyhocks and roses.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I’m so sorry that I am late replying, but I have been away and offline. Thank you for your kind comments. As soon as I’m back to normal, I will read and comment on your post.

      Like

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.