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Tears in My Tapioca
by Thomas A. Thrun

My Spanish guitar would gently weep,
if I had one, if I even knew how to play one.
And, it shouldn’t have taken me 67 years
just to make tapioca pudding from scratch!

I stir over a new gas stove, one with all
its digital readouts. And I stir and stir more,
remembering Ma’s stirring over her 1940s
Monarch electric/wood stove. A combo.

There’s a lump in my throat as I recall
the rich, creamy taste of each tiny pearl,
explosions of childhood memories in each
hopeful spoonful, as mine comes up to a boil.

And, it’s then that I feel her watching me.
Ma smiles knowingly at my having just used
an electric beater for the egg whites. Ugh!
It shouldn’t have taken me 67 long years

to do this, just to make tapioca pudding
from scratch! I am nervous and slop
over the edges of my six pudding dishes
as I pour. Ma tells me not to hurry.

There are so-salty tears welling now.
They pair with regrets and all my fears
that mine will never set up, just like hers.
Ma sings to me. She tells me not to worry.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…

Tears fall earnestly now into my tapioca. It
looks and tastes almost as good as hers, only
I may not have added enough love to mine.
Ma smiles again. She tells me I did just fine.

I stifle a sob. Somewhere, a Spanish guitar
gently weeps. My kitchen is a mess, as am I. It
shouldn’t have taken me 67 years to make tapioca
pudding from scratch. Or to say, I love you, Ma.

PHOTO: 1960s magazine ad for Minute Tapioca (detail).

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NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: As my mother, Norma Gausmann Thrun (1920-2010) worked side-by-side with my farming Wisconsin father for 46 years. She now rests peacefully with him, again, just down the road from our family farm, in Hope Cemetery. Ma and her four younger brothers graduated high school, while Pa quit school after eighth grade to take over his family’s farm. When they married in 1944, Ma followed Pa to the next farm down the road, and that’s where they began their farm life together and raised us three kids. Ma never worked outside the home. She honed her homemaking skills working with her bothers’ wives and the Ladies of Hope Church. Among my childhood memories are her telling me not to touch the hot baking sheets full of homemade chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies, as well as to stay away from the red-hot burners on her old Monarch electric/wood stove as she made tapioca pudding. My favorite. My folks both were proud of my becoming the local, hometown weekly newspaper editor upon my graduating from college. As well as my being a poet, capturing the farm and our way of life with both photos and words.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Norma Thrun still was making her own homemade lye soap in the 1980s for washing dirty farm overalls and other clothes with her wringer washing machine. She hardly ever used the electric dryer.  It takes too much electricity. Clothes were hung out on the backyard lines or on an old accordioned-wood rack in the farmhouse’s large upstairs bathroom. Today, the farm is less than a half mile away from sprawling Madison, Wisconsin. Ma stayed on the farm, with the help of her children, for four years after her husband passed. The farm auction took place in the fall of 1994.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas A. Thrun’s poetry is heavily influenced by his rural Wisconsin farm heritage and writings of Robert Frost. A retired weekly newspaper editor, Thrun has had his poetry and short stories published in numerous on-line and bound anthologies. You can find him in the 2024 Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, published by the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Recovering from a successful, recent prostrate cancer surgery, he is back writing again and looking forward to taking two growing grand boys fishing again.