The Late Years Twenty-Four

Judy by Emma Tobin late 2018.

***
The Late Years Twenty-Four April 14, 2019

I lost and then I found part
of my life story–those winter
months in Kostroma near
my beloved and yet far. I made
my own life there, visited my
friends and entertained them,
wrote poems and shopped at
the big daily market for fresh
cheese and butter, rode the
trolley bus, fell on icy sidewalks,
heard the symphony orchestra, 
celebrated now painter exhibits. 
I could speak Russian which
few Americans could. I hunted
through my boxes and filing
cabinets for the second half
of Frost and Sun. No sign. I
 couldn’t lose it. Those pages 
were so completely missing. 
I remembered how in 2017 I went
several times to the Hospital
Emergency Room. I found the
title but no book on the computer.
Then I looked at all the files
stacked on the floor: coal ash 
records, recently held classes,
new published books. Could the
missing chapters be there? I’d look.
I sat near the stacks and began
to check them. I set aside ones
I’d give to Duke as archives,
others I’d need to keep, and then
I reached for the file on another
stack. Two fell loose as if looking
for me. I saw the words Frost and
Sun. Could it be? It was. All ten
chapters of my winter in Kostroma.
For my friends it was a hard time. 
They couldn’t predict their future.
They didn’t even try. “We don’t
know,” they said. Their children 
were sick. Some of the food they’d
saved for the winter had spoiled.
Their salaries would barely feed
them, yet they lavished feasts on me.
They gave me clothes for the bitter
winter. I was cherished. I knew I’d
been right to go. I’ve never regretted
that love or the risks I took. It was
the way I lived my life when I began
my full adulthood, my own claim
on this earth, my own choices, and
the consequences that followed.
I’m glad I was the way I was and
did the things I did and took the 
risks I took. Mine was and is a life
with one overriding purpose, to be
the human being only I could be,
to find that simple courage: 
to be myself.