I had a poetry class to take, my first. Think about repetition within poems, the prompt said.

Come ready to share one form of repetition. But I skipped the poetry class because I wanted to haul mulch in heavy bags with you at dusk. Four bags, packed into the back of our car. One after the other, we heaved until our backs and arms ached and then dipped again into the bags, hands drinking from the rain-soaked mulch we picked up from the pile behind the Baptist church. And we spread the mulch over dirt and weeds over the course of hours. And then I swept the sidewalk and the little concrete pathway beside the rose bushes, sweeping in quick, strong strokes the way my dad taught me as a child, along the hot, grass-flecked sidewalks of my youth, while my mother brought us lemonade in the tall-ridged glasses we’d gotten from the gas station. Our brooms sent clouds of dust and dirt flying into the garden and street. It was early May, before the time of mosquitos and flies, and our roses arced delicate necks over the pathway, as you clipped them, as my back ached from the repetition. And I worried about my poetry class at seven on Zoom, and the lines I had missed, and all the poems I had missed reading and writing over the course of a life, because I still have never taken a poetry class, because we’ve been busy working and raising children, the way my parents did, catching moments together amid the sweeping, thought of this as I cleared the narrow pathway into clean, concrete lines. As the sky faded to gray, and the children came in and out, and the cat disappeared into the rose bushes, I stopped tracking the class, which may or may not have been over. The streets were quiet, aside from the swish, swish of the broom and your rose clipping. And I thought again of my childhood as you collected the roses that had fallen and gathered them so tenderly into tall vases.