Manicure

Chipped, peeling magenta, glossy as a new car,
incongruous on my aging peasant hands,
still shines bravely
a week after my teenage niece,
who insisted we go to the salon together,
has flown back home with her boyfriend.
What remains of their visit is memory, residue,
trickles of sand from our trip to the beach.
I confess, I like my bedazzled talons,
the way they gleam and sparkle
as I wash dishes or dig in the garden,
further ruining what’s left of their sheen.
My niece, lovely in her satin skin,
floated through her days here with a grace
I never had at her age. Who knows
what she and her boyfriend
thought of my husband and me—lumbering,
stiffening, sighing, worried old relics
who ferried them to the city’s museums and tourist traps,
where they bought matching T-shirts and baseball caps
to commemorate their trip to California?
I remember the elders of my youth:
How they were bit players
in the central drama that was my heroic quest.
How harshly I judged them, and also how I envied
their faded battle scars and
that the storms of life were (I thought) behind them.
Plus, as my niece remarked, “When you’re old,
you have more money.”
I myself am wealthy with regret,
affluent in aching knees and, OK, perhaps
a few things done right,
including the ramshackle remains
of a ridiculous manicure, conceived
and carried out in love.