We sit in their kitchen, coffee mugs warming our hands. We should start planning ahead, I begin. But my father starts complaining about the plow guy I’ve hired, says he can do it himself, why waste all that money? As though he hasn’t fallen, won’t fall again. As though the snow is not deep and wet. As though my mother, who has struggled to walk since her stroke, can still get to the back door to check on him.

metal-gray sky

Now her face seems to fold in on itself as my father asks whether I’ve filed their latest insurance clam. I should be doing those things, she says. My father doesn’t hear, doesn’t see. He is gazing out the sliding glass door at the ice-covered patio, at the woods where deer and wild turkeys sometimes walk, sometimes pause on their way up the hill. Eyes on the trees, he asks me to call for a new prescription to replace the one my mother can’t find. I’m so sorry, she whispers. I am wiping her cheek, telling her it’s not her fault, it’s okay, when my father says he’s going to go take a nap.

cold wind in the pines

But the future, I say. We should plan in case— He holds up a hand. You worry about more than you have to. Absentmindedly, he adjusts the cord on the emergency call button he wears around his neck. I don’t remind him that last time I had them both practice the drill, neither could hear the disembodied voice on the response line. Now he says, The future isn’t here yet. We have the aide. We’re managing. He glances at my mother, then stares again out the sliding glass door. Let’s keep taking it day by day, focus on the here and now.

waiting crow

And this is why I am here, now, in their kitchen: to lay the heavy words out, face up, on the table in front of them.

Jennifer L. Freed

is the author of the full-length collection When Light Shifts: A Memoir in Poems, a finalist for the 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton book prize. In the 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, her memoir received three distinctions: finalist for the Medal Provocateur, second place for Legacy Non-fiction, and Grand Prize short list. Her poems appear in Atlanta Review, Rock Paper Poem, Rust and Moth, Sheila-na-Gig, SWWIM, Vox Populi, and What the House Knows, among other journals and anthologies. She writes, teaches, and facilitates writing workshops in Massachusetts.

Author’s website: https://jfreed.weebly.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Losing Touch by Jennifer L. Freed, First Place Winner of MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4 in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 33, August 2026)

⚡ Gravity, Ms. Freed’s first haibun, published in Issue 28 of MacQ (April 2025)

⚡ Six Words in an Ellen Bass Poem Take Me Back To My Brother’s Hospital Room in Atlanta Review (Spring/Summer 2025)

⚡ List of Publications at the author’s website