Sitting at the island in my kitchen

where I write. On the surface before me an open notebook. A pen. A half-filled page. A sentence stopped short of a verb. A word about to alight startled like a sparrow at my approach.  

What is life without words? What outside of writing? My father had a typewriter on a desk in a corner of our living room. My mother had her sewing machine. Her kitchen. She said, “my kitchen.” I think I remember my dad, in his basement workshop, placing a door on its side and attaching legs to create a table. He said, “This is for your mother’s kitchen.” He may not actually have said that. My mother, for sure, worked that kitchen. She baked cookies. She made lemon meringue pies. She wore aprons.  

She sewed aprons with pockets and rickrack trim. Gave most away as gifts. She fashioned intricate doll clothes, floral print dresses with puffy sleeves edged in blue piping. Years after her heart gave out, I found one of the doll dresses in the attic, in a cardboard doll suitcase. Years after I gave up dolls. I have no memory of where she placed her sewing machine so it would be safe from children and children safe from it, we four, whose clothes and doll clothes she made. 

I imagine her saying Charles. I’m not sure she ever called Dad by his given name. I imagine Charles’s mother, grumpy. That requires little imagination. I remember my mother clearing our dining room table of bills and receipts, saying, “There. Now she can’t say I never try.” I set places for eight.  

She retreated to her kitchen, the kitchen she wanted, removed from the flow of foot traffic coming in from the back door. With a west window overlooking the backyard so she could watch us play. She baked ham and made scalloped potatoes. She did not call any of us in to help her peel the potatoes. When it was too cold to play outdoors, we played Monopoly at the dining room table, and if she sensed we were edging toward a quarrel, she called out ways to simplify the rules. 

My kitchen, this kitchen, superimposed on her kitchen. My windows look south, out on the street. Joggers, a dog walker, a sister and brother sometimes on scooters, sometimes bikes. I see them most mornings even in the cold. They move into and outside of my writing. My kitchen without boundaries. My kitchen central to the floor plan. Myself still a child. Even as a woman at an island. A mother. A grandmother.  

Pen in hand. A verb perches: be. As an active verb. Then, one by one, others. Imagine. Thank. Pray. Write. Each a separate island. Until I begin to see an archipelago.  

Margaret Rozga is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Restoring Prairie (Cornerstone Press, 2024). She served as the 2019–2020 Wisconsin poet laureate. 

The essay first appeared in Mom Egg Review, Vol. 19 (2021).