by Laura Rodley
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Retired, nurse Jean nurses the homeless along Chico’s bicycle path near the intersection of Rio Lindo without washing their backs or dispensing medicines: she gathers their trash, clothes, and wet-wipes with a three-foot-grabber bequeathed by a friend. Fellow walkers along the path say thank you while she fills plastic bags, wears cheap plastic gloves, monitoring her own heart with her pace-maker. Only walls away divide her from being homeless herself, though she worked full time since her teens. She gives back to her country walking amongst her brethren fallen on hard times, some still homeless after the Paradise Camp fire. It’s her home, her country; in the handkerchief-sized plot outside her apartment her tomatoes reach the size of baseballs. You know people kill rattlesnakes, she says, all you have to do is walk around them. They live here too. The Hopi consider them to be sacred, as is the ground she walks on, lifting another clump of trash into her bag, just the way my father gathered litter as he walked from the train station on his way home, a veteran longtime gone, planting tomatoes when he could no longer see, counting them as round shadows that hung in the air, sixty-seven last count.
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Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.
Wonderful patriotic poem!!!!