Kicking the Habit

My mother smoked cigarettes until she
had reached her seventies. One day she looked
in the mirror and startled herself, the cigarette
between her lips, the thin grey waft of poison
curling upwards, and what she saw was
an old woman,  smoking, and it wasn’t pretty.

A bulb had flashed, a shutter clicked, and she
did not like what she saw. So that day she quit,
cold turkey, and never smoked again in her life
She lived into her ninety-third year, so how
much her life was shortened by tobacco,
no one can ever say

I asked her how hard it had been to cure
an addiction grown over a half-century and she
answered that when the urge to smoke seized her,
all the resolve she needed was that disturbing
image: old woman with a fag in her mouth.

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© Copyright, 2012, Glen Sorestad.
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