Mardi Gras

 

 

King Cake, 2019

Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras.

The sin before penitence.

The rowdiest we’ll get here is some fine chicken gumbo-just checked in on the roux-and some rice and some King Cake with a little bitty baby in it.  And that’s just fine with me.

Back when gusto for food was less of a fearsome thing, we had gumbo with shrimp and andouille.   We had gangs of people over when we lived on Grove Avenue.  My Ya-Ya Miss May got the baby.  She thought it meant good luck.   I told it her meant that she would be the one to host the next party.   She would have rather had the luck.   I don’t blame her.

I’m not Catholic.   Growing up, I didn’t know anything about Lent.   I think in the Presbyterian world of the Shenandoah Valley, Lent -or the solemness of everything- was pretty much an every day type thing.

The first alleged gumbo I ever had was from a can of Campbell’s soup.  There was not a fleck of roux to be found.  I think it might have had celery and a hint of bell pepper in it.   Maybe some chicken cubed like dice.  Maybe tomatoes for some unknown reason.   Okra, for that sticky gumbo stamp.   I’m sure there was no file’.  It was untouched by sassafras or sass.

There might have been a facsimile of gumbo cooked up in the kitchen of my southern college but I was so disinterested after my initial taste from that can that I may not have even glanced at it.

And then, years later, Sixto took me to New Orleans for my birthday.  I had gumbo.  And I had a mighty sensory awakening.

Now Sixto makes gumbo every Mardi Gras and does voo doo in there, evoking that city and its sin and its flavor and all that stirred pot of a life I didn’t know you could take a spoonful of and then lick your lips after.

Gumbo and beads and red wine at our table tonight.

And, you know, let the good times roll.

The Color of Winter

 

 

January brings its own landscape to the yard. This morning, the yard is ambered in ice. Tree limbs look as though they’re made of smoke and the winter fog drapes around them. At first, everything is muted. It’s like ongoing pre-dawn twilight, before the colors come. Icicles hang from the bird feeders; the round ones are now small carousels hiding frozen seeds. The grays and browns of the birds blend into the background as they forage. And then, the loud alarm of a crow and a sleek jet of black flies over the yard. It carries red berries in its beak. And suddenly the world is full of color.

A Memory of Christmas

I am standing outside in the snow, my feet trussed in two layers of socks over my bright red tights, all tucked tightly into rubber boots.

We are caroling with gusto. There is no harmony, just flat out singing in our seven and eight year old voices, all loud sopranos, even the boys. We shuffle in place and slap our mittened palms against our legs before getting the cue from our choir director, the amazing Miss Molly Sue, who smells like powder and church.  We launch into “Joy to the World” with everything we have, the notes lifting up and cracking the night air with child-hearted music. Because we all know what comes next.

Hot chocolate, loaded with marshmallows that float like sweet cushions before melting bit by bit into the darkness.  We stand in neighbors’ houses and drink their chocolate that comes to us straight from the big pan on the stove, warming up in their kindness and the soft yellow light from their lamps.

The next house has popcorn. Another, cookies. Sometimes, there is  cider sharp with cloves and cinnamon and just a nudge away from bitter. We are fueled with sugar and salt and with our moment of being on stage, even if it was outside and like the tundra in the movie “White Wilderness”.

We sing every song we had practiced and then some of us are loaded into dry, idling cars that shock with their warmth and smell of the aftershave of their fathers, the powdered cheeks of their mothers.   Others walk through the little town with their cold boots stiff against the snow.  We go through our own front door where the light is soft and the kitchen smells like the memory of dinner and Christmas is waiting just outside, where the notes of our songs glisten like crystals.

Parchment

This skin of mine always surprises me. There’s more of it, for one thing. And it’s older, requiring more attention than I figured for. It happened quickly. But underneath this layer is the skin that was dusted with pollen from forsythia, yellow as yolk from a spring egg, and spread over fingers and knees, under earlobes and across my forehead. I would uncurl myself and my powdered skin out from under the untamed forsythia, a six year old warrior. I was painted with the insides of small flowers, my skin ready to do battle with the day and its grass stains and scratches, my knees ready for bruises, wearing the spit of flowers like a talisman.

Soon, my teenaged body was stretched taut over my muscles, flexible as a coil, unfamiliar enough to be stared at late at night in my own mirror, sharp and soft all at once. A reception waiting to happen.

Further on, my babies lifted like warm Sunday rolls in my belly. It was the only time I baked anything just right. My skin stretched over their growing bodies while their skin stretched over their bones; we were canvasses at the same time, nesting teepees. They left silver rivulets on my hips and stomach. I was tattooed by my children from the inside out.

And now, I am tucked into the softness of an older cocoon. But somewhere, there is an unseen zipper and when I find it, I will step out of this layer for just one moment, covered in yellow and running like a creek toward life.

Redemption

“He’s an angel,” she told them. “ He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.”

This quote from “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the basis of a prompt in Amy’s Exploring Fiction class.   Take it and go, she said.

I took her at her word.

Named it Redemption.

*************************************************************************************

 

I took the baby.
I left two feathers.
The cinnamon colored one,
The big one,
Is from me.

The little one,
The grey and white one,
Is from your baby.

Don’t worry.
He’ll grow into his colors.
I’ll make sure of it.

His flight feathers are already sprouting.
Indigo.
He’ll be a fast one.

Don’t listen for him, though.
You won’t hear him.
Because he can be fast
Or he can sing.
But he can’t have both.

I kept his voice.
Gave him talons.
Because one sharp weapon
Is all he’ll ever need.

 

 

 

 

 

Leaving Home

Fresh out of the chrysalis.

 

1

A monarch holds tight
To its shredded chrysalis.
I understand why.

2

The first divorced Christmas
Triscuits and cheese for dinner.
The sweet taste of peace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Landscape

I have six new scars on my body since the beginning of summer. I am tattooed from the inside out with stories.

There are the fresh ones around my navel and under my left ribs, still red with their newness. But there are also the ones on my right knee and hip from the incident with the pony and its cart, the close spinning contact with pavement and small rocks, the long ago child’s body broken and then mended. There are the bright hallucinations of wild ponies in the hall of the hospital, of a silent, non-threatening Jesus glowing in the corner of the sunny antiseptic room. There was a brushing against Death’s jacket, so close I could smell the smoke on it, and then the coming back to finish first grade. There is a small blue-grey pebble in the skin over the kneecap that still hasn’t come out. There is the lack of a limp, against all odds.

There is the jagged slash on the back of my heel from riding a blue Schwinn bicycle barefoot and catching the sharp pedal like a scalpel. That scar holds the memory of my mother and her hands full of gauze and mercurochrome kneeling and mending me, not one word of lecturing even though I knew to wear some kind of shoe and flip flops didn’t count. Her fingers coating the split heel with that sharp red medicine and then giving me a bandage worth bragging about. The scar on my foot today is a bright white, like an electrical arc shooting into the sole.

There’s a small, deep one on my elbow from failing at a somersault at the 4th of July Ruritan Horseshow, going up like a starfish and landing like a guppy onto the one piece of grass that held a glass shard. The smoke from the barbecued chicken fell over the shoulders of the mother of my best friend, a nurse, who inked me up with more mercurochrome and sent me off with a bandaid and a warning and a fresh new scar.

They’re on my chin and in a small straight line under my nose.

There are scars from me reaching into ovens and retrieving casseroles and roasted things, holiday dinners and failed loaves of whole wheat bread.

Some are invisible, unless you write them down. The ones that happened after two drinks too many and arguments flaring into the night. The sharp edges of a tongue that did deep damage. The slash of the distress brought to the surface while someone was dying and you hadn’t resolved all the wrongs. The missing parts of your history. The empty places, leaving scars carved out like strip mines.

Knitted, woven, knotted, inked, threaded together, they are the paragraphs and chapters written on my skin and in my mind.

They aren’t trophies. They’re medals under the lotion I use to soothe them.

Autobiography

I am from bottom land and whirlpools,
Black walnuts and tribes of deer at twilight.
I am from a notch in the bend of the river.

I am from apple trees and
The bees that suck their pitted fruit
And sting the feet of children.

I am from Fred and Mary Emma,
Fitz and Jolene;
From football games on the radio
And love letters written in peacock blue ink.

I am from vigorous July gardens
And jars holding a thousand tastes of summer
In the dark of December.

I am from big snows
And little churches.
I am from covered dishes
Offered after wakes,
A subdued wreath
on the front door announcing the house holds
the presence of the dead.

I come from hymns
And catechisms.
From practiced cursive writing
And narrow lipped warnings that
Christians don’t swear.

I am from wild flame azaleas
In woods near homeplaces.
From great aunts with braids the color of steel
Clipping branches and bringing in blooms.

I am from cemeteries on the side of a hill
Where all the names are familiar.

I am from stories and legends,
Sermons and lies.
From gardens and root cellars,
Creeks and springs.

I am from pistons and steam,
And black smoked Shay engines.
From spider’s webs wet with September
And radio observatory antennae that turn
And listen to the stars.

I am from August morning fogs
And February storms;
From crow feathers and hoot owls,
From elderberries and ramps.

I am the story of my father’s Royal typewriter,
His fingers on its worn keys,
And my mother’s red, red lipstick-
Her infinite kiss caught
In the crease of a blue-inked letter.

 

Vestiges

Every day, there was more furniture leaning between the culvert and the fence. One day, a brown leatherette sofa piled with embroidered pillows. The next, a heavy matching chair, white trash bags tossed against its bulky arms. A book case with warped shelves, empty of pages and covers.

Cleaning house, I thought.

It had been raining every day for a week and the pile kept getting bigger. More trash bags, tied tight with red plastic, tilting under the shadowy weight. A large grey radio with a crooked antenna.

By the end of the week, there was a small table and three wooden chairs. A crockpot was centered on the table, next to a green and yellow crocheted child’s blanket. A vacuum cleaner’s brushes rested on the drenched grass.

Then the toys started showing up. A stuffed pink camel. Small things on wheels. A baby carrier with a coral cushion and large plastic beads dripping with rain. A humidifier.

Next to the metal fence that encircled the big yard, something new. An iron bedstead, its headboard painted the soft salmon color of a summer peony. It was set apart, placed upright against the squares of the fence, drawing attention by the care of it.

I had an iron bedstead once. I found it hanging on a dark wall in an old tobacco barn, the farmer said he had no need of it, rusted and smoky as it was. Six dollars and you can take it, he said.

It was chinked with rust. I took a stiff brush to it, scraped and scraped but it still looked pocked even after all the pressure I could apply to it. I got tired of fooling with it, impatient to paint it and get it in my small room in the little house I was renting far out in the country. I was proud of my choice of sky blue paint. Underneath, the headboard looked scabbed with leftover layers of rough iron. I had taken the easy way out. The scars of the bed’s past stayed that way for years.

The iron on the pink bed was smooth, cleared of age and rust. The paint wasn’t chipped. Care had been taken.

I couldn’t imagine leaving that pink bed to the elements like that. I kept the blue bed for years. It chipped the whole time. Just like the marriage. When I left, in a hurry and in secret, that blue iron frame went into the U-Haul with me. I was back in a small rented place, in a city this time. I threw a blanket with a geometric design over it and called it freedom.

But this abandoned bed haunted me. So smooth and pastel. Careful in its place against the fence, in the rain.

And in my head, I heard “There but for the Grace.”

There but for the Grace.

I willed myself to look away. And then I looked back against my will.

Grace is a thing with feathers and weights.

Sacred Geometry

My pockets are stuffed with memories. I rattle with them when I walk.

I hold them up to the light-sometimes it’s the sun, sometimes it’s 2:45 in the morning and there’s just enough moon to make them breathe on their own.

I empty my pockets, my mind. I find treasures.

People are there. Their words. Their faces. The outline of their absence.

Pets, the memory of their fur, their colors, of the places they used to be.

Summer days that smell of onions and plums.

The faded lemon light over humid fields at the end of a day in August. Driving through that light, I finally understood the meaning of the word “benediction”.

The memories make noises.

The sound of a saxophone. The taste and feel of the player’s lips on mine after the music stopped.

The shiver of the night’s dew just under my hips and shoulders. The imprint of my body on the early June grass.

Once they leave my hands, my mind, the remembrances shift and glint like mercury or crystallized smoke. Sometimes, they transmigrate.

There is the memory of a well aimed smile, the smooth teeth, and then the hidden venom.

There are ministers with robes like crow’s wings.

There are gilded handles on a coffin.

The memories glint and knock, reminding me not to walk into the deep part of that river or I’ll go under for sure.

I reach into my pocket for a feather, a two -toned leaf, the bubble -eyed shell of a cicada. I lift them up to the alter of my history.

All the dots connect. It is a sacred geometry.