If you look up as you walk through the back door into my kitchen, you will see a poster written in Swedish, a translation of a poem written in 1934 by the great William Carlos Williams. In addition to being a pediatrician, Dr. Williams, from Rutherford, New Jersey, was a great poet. Here is the story of how the poster and poem, below in the original English, ended up in my kitchen.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

One morning some years ago, as I was moving around the kitchen trying to decide what we should eat for breakfast, I was reminded of a poem that I had copied down as an adolescent and then hung on my bedroom door many years earlier. “This is just to say,” I began to recite aloud, and my three young children stood riveted as I spoke the poem from memory. “That’s not a poem,” they protested. “You made that up!”

I picked up my phone to call my brother. “Forgive me for waking you,” I said, “but I need a favor.” Their dark, round eyes grew big as plums while he completed the prompt I supplied.

The children saved their delicious new discovery to share with their father over breakfast. Now we all knew the poem.

Some years later, their sweet father, in Sweden on a layover, took the opportunity to visit friends who were spending a cold, dark, and somewhat lonely winter in Stockholm. Poems had been placed in Stockholm’s public transit system throughout the city, and riders had been encouraged to take them home once the celebration had ended.

A remnant, therefore, from the recent poetry festival, the brightly colored poster leaned against our friends’ icebox. “What does it say?” asked my always inquisitive husband, and our friends began to translate, “This is just to say…”

I have loved this poem since the first time I read it as a child. I did not know for many years that its author, like me, was a doc from New Jersey. I did not know that someday I would place great personal and professional importance on fresh fruit, or that my beloved grandfather’s preferred choice of the word “icebox” would stay with me all my life. I certainly didn’t know that it would become a fabulously entertaining meme whose many iterations would entertain on a regular basis. Nor that one of my closest friends would make it her personal mission to send me as many of these memes as she could find!

I cannot even say why it is so special to me. Not only do I love this poem, but, to tell the truth, I feel like it loves me right back. Some things just are.