Carlton D. Fisher is an Instructor in the English department at SUNY Jefferson in upstate NY, near the Canadian border. He is also currently enrolled as a part-time doctoral student in the creative writing program at SUNY Binghamton, where he studies poetry under Maria Mazziotti Gillan. His work has appeared in Assaracus, The Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Sugar Mule, OCHO, and Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed. ---------
Tin Foil
My grandmother washed her tin foil,
smoothed it carefully,
folded it into a drawer in her kitchen
to reuse it,
even though my grandfather had worked for Alcoa
and there were thousands of feet of it in rolls
in her basement.
She was always afraid she might run out.
She was used to saving things—
every book she had ever read
catalogued neatly in the hallway closet,
her clothes carefully mended and re-mended,
hemlines re-stitched,
buttons re-sewn,
and when a garment couldn’t be saved anymore,
she cut it into quilt squares
and stitched them across a frame,
making thick blankets for the winter months
in case the power went off
or the furnace broke down.
She grew accustomed to conservation,
realized everything was a finite resource,
had waited patiently for my grandfather to retire
so they could start a different life together,
and one month after his final day of work,
she woke up next to his body,
already cold,
taking all the plans of travel and retirement with him.
So she saved the things she could—
empty Cool Whip containers to store leftovers,
empty pill bottles to hold buttons,
and those worn, wrinkled squares of aluminum foil,
washed and smoothed and saved,
because life had taught her
that even the simplest things
couldn’t be counted to last.