Acclimatization

Mrs. Emma Hanover was most upset

that her eighty-year-old mother

had decided to take up rock climbing.

It was absurd!  Absolutely absurd!

“She can barely walk from her car

to the produce section of the grocery store,”

Emma insisted to anyone who would listen.

“This is unseemly and improper,

and she will surely break her hip.”

Nevertheless, Emma’s mother

spent her remaining savings on

expensive mountaineering equipment

and booked a trip to Kathmandu.

“This is completely unacceptable!”

Emma cried. “These mountaineering guides,

taking away the last of an old woman’s money!”

She inquired as to whom she should sue,

but the Nepalese ambassador merely shrugged.

“Honey, you can’t stop your mother from traveling,”

Emma’s husband stated with a sigh.

Her hippie sister, Carol, told Emma that their mother

should “seek her bliss,” or some such nonsense.

Emma’s children didn’t seem to much care,

and she wondered if everyone had effectively

lost their minds.

“I always meant to climb Mt. Everest,”

Emma’s mother explained at dinner

the night before her journey,

“and I mean to do it now.”

“Mother, you can’t!”

Emma exclaimed with a shriek.

“You won’t make it five feet past your hotel alone,

and even if you do, you’ll die

at the bottom of the mountain.”

“I never said,” her mother replied,
“that I meant to come back.

And as for the money

you always imagined was yours,

I’m taking it with me.

Whatever I don’t spend on the way

will go to the children of Nepal.”

Emma stared at her mother with a gaping mouth,

but her mother had no more to say,

and left Emma with the bill.