Aunt Sara has an obsession with her Welsh genealogy.

Her light blue eyes contrast

with graying auburn hair;

the heritage her Welsh father left behind

as the gift that fuels this hobby.

She purchased an 84-acre farm

in between Columbus and the rest of rolling-hills Ohio

where gravel roads meet dusty mailboxes

and the first Welsh settlers settled. 

She needed air outside of the city;

a place to feel dirt beneath fingertips

and nightly shooting meteorites to remind her

her mother’s pain now lay at rest next to her dad.

Her little homestead sits on a creek where

her greatest known grandmother washed laundry

remembering her Welsh home.

Aunt Sara visits the local Welsh museum where

Elizabeth Davies knows her by name.

They bend admiringly over tarnished collections

of Welsh love spoons and horse brass

and imagine life on Sara’s homestead for her ancestors.

Sometimes she visits the museum quietly,

thumbing frayed quilted blankets matching 

the red dragon of her own family crest.

The decaying wooden museum floors

coughing with memory and dust,

trapping mildew in nostrils and transforming sun rays 

into painted silk streams through stained glass windows,

connect to the traveler’s weariness in Aunt Sara.

Her heart, scarred from the stitching, 

beats to the rhythms of her faded green tractor

and whistling Cardinals and Indigo Buntings.

Sweeping on the back of the breeze and

racing through swaying branches

is the stinging memory of child loss.

Wafting in the warm fragrance 

of worm and insect decay

is the bitter, suffocating reality of 

her late husband’s fatal accident.

Dancing among the embers of a summer campfire

is the soft reminder that the Earth 

gives back in ways

loss cannot deprive her of.

As canning tomatoes push up

their plump red love for Aunt Sara,

the wildflowers spill petals to her muddied pond and

cicadas chirp flirting endearing melodies,

the stars sing her tanned freckles to sleep.

On the weekends she sips on cheap local beer

adding yet another page to her Welsh heritage collage.

Aunt Sara has an obsession with her Welsh genealogy;

simply and beautifully because 

what is now at rest 

has returned peacefully to the Earth

in ways she waits patiently to partake in.