Would slip from my own now if I could, the one
that’s taken too much sun—age spots,  

wrinkles, moles, and that other spot I didn’t know.
Prepare for surgery tomorrow

and think of Mother’s kitchen, peaches dipped
in a hot bath, skins slipped off.   

She needed no directions, made her own deductions,
round glasses steamed over, she

resembled a chemistry professor. Hair tied back
with a kerchief, sweat trailed from

her temples—pans bubbled like decanters when
she prepared what we called sauce,

a staple equal to our meat-and-potatoes suppers.
Bad spots cut off, pits removed, 

ripe peaches halved for sugar syrup—Ball-jar bath,
a rack of eight, blue-enameled canner.

Tomorrow, I’ll listen the way I listened for her,
counted lids that “popped.” Mom’s

August operation a success only when the
good seal signals sauce safe

to eat all winter.

Born and raised in North Dakota, Madelyn Camrud is a graduate of the University of North Dakota with degrees in visual arts and English. She’s had three full collections published: This House Is Filled With Cracks and Oddly Beautiful, New Rivers Press; and Songs of Horses and Lovers, NDSU Regional Studies Press, 2013. Her poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Round, Soundings East, Water~Stone Review, Third Wednesday, Virginia Normal, and New Millenium Writings, among others.