The Iowa Peach and the Arkansas Farmer
The only air in the car came through the open windows.
The heat and dust stuck to the back of cotton dresses and between legs
on bench seats.
Grasshoppers and wasps and too many flies to count rode along.
Maybe they wanted to get out of Iowa too.
Finally, there was iced tea and Louise’s deviled eggs served on company dishes.
Alice unpacked her Sunday best and
Louise told her again how he proposed as she ironed.
Later, they lay side by side on the sleeping porch, fanning each other and whispering
about what would follow the vows and cake and car ride to Branson.
Something old and something new,
something borrowed and something blue.
A good luck penny was found for the shoe
in a friend of the bride’s pocket.
The trade, he said, was Alice’s address and her promise to write.
Her cheeks blushed like an Arkansas peach on the first day of the season.
He had never met a girl as pretty a peach,
and he told her so in his first letter.
She kept that letter and all the ones that followed, and she blushed again
every time she read them, for the next 73 years.
Copyright 2019 – Laurie Marshall
This poem is being posted as part of the #100dayproject. Find out more here.
