GLORIA BY THE MOUNTAINSIDE

GLORIA BY THE MOUNTAINSIDE
(FOR MY AUNT GLORIA)

I’ve loved her since I was a child, when my thoughts ran deep and wild,
And in those years her spirit ran free,
My first memory of her was a young woman
With a convertible Ford Galaxie.
Baby blue it was if my memory serves,
As filtered through this web of words.
Gloria of the small town, but destined for bigger things,
A dental assistant in a local office until she found her wings.
Her first ticket out was my Uncle Tim.
How could she help herself falling for him?
She met him in the dental biz, they married and began a life,
She tried so hard to make it work, her new role as a wife.
And for awhile her years were golden, it was Gloria by the Lake,
A red Jaguar convertible, the Chris Craft and the Gloria-T,
My cousins Timmy and Annette would play with my brother and me.
Our cousins by marriage, Uncle Tim’s own.
Yet she treated them the same as me and my brother,
A cool ass aunt and a surrogate mother,
And Gloria by the lakeside seemed to last forever,
But really it was just a hiccup in time,
Burnished in memory, those summers sublime.

In the great leap of time it was only a minute,
Uncle Tim cheated and the two of them split,
And then it was Uncle Ronnie for just a while
Another brief marriage and a time of travail,
The city and apartment managing whispered in her ear,
And off she then went on her fortune kissed trail,
Herndon, Stuart Woods, and then Annandale.
It was then that true love came her way,
In the dashing form of my Uncle Ray,
And a love that would last forever just fell into her arms,
The curse at last broken, the third time the charm.

She and Ray lived a life of adventure, saw London, Paris, Rome,
And for a span of several years they called Jamaica home.
They even lived in Florida and braved a hurricane.
But they were lost and lonely there and found the land too flat,
And found they missed the mountains and the country and all that.

So to Stanley it was in the Blue Ridge, high off Skyline Drive.
And there they built their house of dreams, in 2004 or 5.
She lost an older brother and her sister, my mother,
And Cherry, her cherished best friend, passed away as well,
And she cared for my Uncle Johnny with the help of some good friends,
And broke her own hip, when she herself fell,
In a strange and sad chain of events.
But still she survives, and greets the new day.
Gloria by the mountainside with her knight in armor Ray.
And the time has flown since those days of old, yet still her spirit runs free,
Since the days I rode with her, in that convertible Ford Galaxie.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED