Mount Joy, Pennsylvania

We are Guests of the Day at the Best Western in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where my husband and I sleep each weekend, almost four hours from home. Our names are displayed on the welcome sign in the lobby, and the assistant manager awards us free bottled water and a choice of Fritos or Milky Way bars.  

Mornings, we drive the six miles down Mount Joy’s Main Street and into the next town, where my mother-in-law lies in that uneasy truce between living and dying. Evenings, we head back to the hotel. Coming and going, I gaze out the car window at church steeples, diners with Come On In! signs, and freshly scrubbed community parks, and I conjure a different life, a life swathed in the ordinary, a life a few sizes smaller than my own, a gentle life with a slower pulse and clear, finite borders. 

In this life, I would devote my days to cheerful service at soup kitchens. I would crochet scarves for the indigent elderly. Cloaked in an aura of easy piety, I would become a regular at Sunday church, greeting all who crossed my path. In this life, I would accept loss as part of a greater plan, and you are in my prayers might actually provide comfort. 

I would not ask so many questions or demand so many answers. A solemn walk through the churchyard labyrinth would calm my lingering unease, heal those old, stubborn wounds that bleed into the same tired poems. It would be enough.  

This is what consumes me as we come and go, come and go, tucked away in this bucolic hamlet as my mother-in-law’s life falters to a close, as her labored breath slows, as time blurs and stretches between breakfasts among strangers and troubled sleep in our third-floor room overlooking the parking lot. We are Guests of the Day, and I want to be the person who accepts this small and earnest tribute with gratitude.  

Irene Fick is the author of The Wild Side of the Window (Main Street Rag) and The Stories We Tell (Broadkill River Press), which both received first-place awards from the National Federation of Press Women. Her poems have been published in such journals as Delmarva Review, the Broadkill Review, the Blue Mountain Review, Gargoyle, and Willawaw Journal. Her essays have appeared in River Teeth, the Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Hippocampus Magazine. Her third book of poetry will be published in early 2025 by Broadstone Books. She lives in Lewes, Delaware, and can be reached at irenefickpoet.com.

This essay first appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal (2021).