by Gloria Ogo
When the frost settles on the porch rail,
I bring the old basket down from the attic
spools of thread, half-finished scarves,
the quilt my grandmother started
and left folded in a cedar chest,
its patches like fragments of lives lived,
of winters remembered, of hands that carried love through cold.
Each stitch is remembering:
how she hummed under her breath,
counting stories instead of patterns,
how she said warmth is never bought,
it’s made with patience and small motions
and how we, too, must make it,
for those who come after us,
for the ones who will inherit the quiet pulse of our days.
The wool smells faintly of lavender and smoke,
of seasons stacked like books on shelves,
of hands that knew how to carve order
from the chaos of cold and hunger and waiting.
I fold each patch carefully,
pressing the fabric flat with my palms,
as if smoothing the edges of memory itself,
as if holding time in my hands long enough
for it to teach me its secrets.
Outside, the fields are asleep,
their roots dreaming in the dark soil.
The wind rattles the windowpanes
like distant drums of the season,
and I feel the deep weight of what waits unseen
the soil, the seed, the life that sleeps
only to rise again.
Inside, I knead bread until it sighs,
letting the dough rise like a quiet promise,
a rhythm older than me, older than this house,
that spring—and the life we shape—will come again.
Jars of last summer’s harvest line the shelves:
tomatoes like little suns,
green beans, corn, peaches pressed into syrup.
They catch the low light of the afternoon,
reminding me that care can be stored,
that love can be preserved in sugar and salt,
and offered again when the cold comes
to test what we’ve built.
I write between the cracks of the day,
words thick with steam and memory,
scribbling down recipes, old stories,
the way she named each spice,
each act of making a prayer in disguise.
The kettle hums, the house listens,
and in the long hours of stillness,
I feel the quiet pulse of continuity
a rhythm that moves from her hands to mine,
from my hands to those I will never meet,
a thread linking all the lives who labor unseen,
whose care holds the world steady
even in darkness.
In this season of slowness,
even silence is work
the kind that saves us,
the kind that teaches us
how to hold light in small vessels,
how to keep warmth alive
through the long dark,
how to pass it on
until it becomes part of the world itself.
And when the evening comes,
and the first star pricks the sky,
I set the quilt across the chair,
pour a cup of tea,
and feel the weight of winter lift
not by frost or fire,
but by the hands that make it,
the hands that remember,
the hands that will never stop reaching
toward the next season,
toward life’s quiet, unbroken insistence
that even in cold, we endure, we care, we persist.
***
photo credit: Linus Belanger, Unsplash
Gloria Ogo is an American-based Nigerian writer with several published novels and poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Eye to the Telescope, Brittle Paper, Spillwords Press, Metastellar, Gypsophila Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Allegro Poetry Magazine, CON-SCIO Magazine, and more. With an MFA in Creative Writing, Gloria was a reader for Barely South Review. She is the winner of the Brigitte Poirson 2024 Literature Prize, the finalist for the Jerri Dickseski Fiction Prize 2024 and the ODU 2025 Poetry Prize, both with honorable mentions. She is also a finalist for Lucky Jefferson’s 2025 Poetry Contest. Her work was long listed for the 2025 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. You can find more about her at her site https://glriaogo.wixsite.com/gloria-ogo