Outside it is 27 degrees below zero
The air a ravenous wolf
Attacking exposed skin with piercing bite
On my walk from my car to the main entrance of the hospital
I tie my red fleece scarf high enough to cover my nose and cheeks
I breathe in the smell of “real” winter
The only kind we knew in my childhood
Spent in these heroic Minnesota north woods
So different from the asphalt winters I’ve grown accustomed to
Inside
My mother is cold
Lying on that lumpy hospital bed
In that flimsy cotton gown
Waiting to be wheeled into surgery
Where the doctors will lop off her right breast
I want to ask
“What do you plan to do with it?”
That breast that nursed seven children?
That breast I laid upon so many times
Until I fell asleep when I was young
Growing up here in these bitter north woods
I don’t like to think of my mother’s breast
Lying mangled in a bag
With discarded spleens and gall bladders
“What do you plan to do with it?”
That giant table of a breast
Where my mother would frequently prop her book
While lying on the couch
Exhausted
After all the kids went to bed
That breast undoubtedly
Helped her land her first job
As a model for the Sears Roebuck catalogue in 1954
And most likely
It played a part
In helping her land both her husbands
Don’t you think the other breast will be lonely?
Like she was
When her first husband died?
They tell me the doctors know what they are doing
They chop off body parts every day
I know they’ve seen the X-rays, the CAT scans, the MRI
They know how to read them
But they don’t know this breast
This breast
That they will haphazardly throw away
Label “cancerous” or “waste”
This is the heavy breast that rested above my mother’s heart.
For all my life
It kept her safe and warm
I do not ask “What do you plan to do with it?”
Instead, I ask the nurse
To find a blanket for my mother
And in the meantime
I give Mom my red scarf
That still smells like childhood
When cold days were ordinary
When there was no storm too brutal
No snows too blustery to go ice skating on the lake
When I knew, with the certainty of a girl
That she, you, and everyone in my world
Would live forever
(from a Poetry collection called Blue Collar Love Poems)