Sunshine…
on my shoulders makes me happy.
…
You and I are camping with Jenny, camping like we did on the island, when you called me and said you were lonely. We paddled to the shore and hung a hammock and I started biting your lip and pulling at your collar. We had nowhere to be, and that’s why we stayed like that ’til the afternoon sun filtered through the low branches and the brush. And we have nowhere to be now, except around Jenny‘s table. She listens to music by searching songs on Facebook, though she says she only checks it for family news.
You and I are a family now, but I still came from her first. Still, nothing makes more sense than bringing you here to the beach to meet Jenny. The cell that became me was, before Jenny’s daughter was even born, when her womb developed within Jenny’s womb. She carried me before I was my father’s child. I was a part of her when she was a long-haired, barefoot little thing, running on the white sugar sand riverbank, the Jungle Trail. And I was a part of her mother’s mother, who came over in the cargo hold of Turnbull’s slave ships.
How different you and I are. Your fathers came over from Scotland, on the decks of the ships, but not in much better condition than my indentured Spanish mothers. Your Caledonian fathers reached the shore and soon found Indian women in the hills of western Virginia, who became your mothers. They had black hair like Jenny.
…
in my eyes can make me cry.
…
I am Jenny’s granddaughter and I can’t believe I am. She has raven hair, like you do— like I always wished I did, like I still sometimes imagine would grow on our babies’ soft heads. I think the 1/4th of me that is Jenny is recessive, because it sure skipped a few generations. I’ll never be half of the mother she is.
When I was a girl, and too difficult for my momma, I was sent to live down by the water with Jenny. I beat the wall with my fists and yelled obscenities and, on the really bad days, I would dig holes and sit in them. Since she was too afraid to stop me, she didn’t. She shouted at me from the screen room. The hot tears poured down my face and I couldn’t why I didn’t feel a thing, so I stayed quiet. She slammed the screen door, leaving me alone.
She wouldn’t sit with me in my mud puddle; she was strong and thought she could pull me out from the edge of the thing. She couldn’t. I blared my angry music and wallowed.
Her daughter would come get me the next day. I don’t blame Jenny for not being able to fix me, though. She couldn’t have known she had to get down in the mud with me in order to help me out. That’s alright. Jenny is tall, and she is kind, but her emotions steer her vessel. This is why we used to fight so much, before I grew into a woman; I was a woman the day I learned to hold my tongue.
…
on the water is so lovely.
…
Jenny spends every day she can on the gulf, now that she’s at least semi-retired. We kids sit around Jenny’s table on the screen porch, eating the good things she fixed, while she and her middle-aged daughter sit to the side in Adirondack chairs. Her daughter lives in the mountains with her 5 children, far away, but we are visiting for the week. Jenny starts cooking 3 days before the grands arrive, and she is a fine cook. She fried the fish the boys caught last weekend— she used to love being on the water, she says, but so many Yankees have come into town with their big boats and RVs, the fish don‘t bite often enough to suit her anymore. Jenny lets the boys go, staying home with a bit of a headache and with the grandbabies, and with you and me. She says doesn’t need anything more.
…
almost always makes me high.
…
John Denver garbles through her cell phone’s external speaker. She and her daughter laugh loudly, like how you and I laughed last spring in the Subaru with the windows down on that first warm night of the year. The year I found you.
The year you came and sat with me in my mud puddle, then gently asked me if I’d like to try getting up and coming in the house. Once inside, I refused to wipe off my feet and arms, but you made me a sandwich and told me about when you were a child and your mother made you feel so cold that you punched a fence post and broke your hand. I almost didn’t believe you. You are so gentle now.
You told me I could be gentle, too, but I was sure I never could be. You were gentle like a good father, even as a young man. I was a disturbed young woman and a monster and Jenny and her daughter had both given up on me. I told you I was no mother, that I couldn’t carry the 3 babies you always dreamed of, and that you should give up, too.You said I was in no shape be a mother, because who could bring up children in that kind of environment? But you would dig through the mud with me for as long as it took. You told me you believed I could dig, too, and what’s more: you believed I would. You knew that’s what I really wanted. More than to sit and wallow, I wanted to dig and get out.
Jenny and her daughter may have made me, but didn’t know me as well as you did. They didn’t trust me, either. It’s not their fault. They each had to dig through their own mud and learn to laugh in their own sweet time. I hope I have time enough to become their daughter and their granddaughter again, now that I have grown into a woman. The first step is listening to music with them on the screen porch whose door used to slam.
I pray to God I have time. Jenny slaps her knees and my mother spills her iced tea. ”Sunshine almost all the time makes me high,” Denver’s clear tenor croons from the grave.
I am still one of five siblings, and still a child at that. I feel distant from these two women who have grown to rise above the din. I am still very much in it. I still care what others think about me.
And though Jenny and her daughter both love you, getting up to add another helping to your plate, refill your glass, and pat your back, they think me naïve. To be so in love with man seems foolish to them. They have both seen enough bad men to believe that a man’s heart is an amusing and silly thing at best.
The song is over and they head to the kitchen to clean up the supper dishes, cackling happily all the way. I don’t often laugh around them, and I don’t laugh now. But you know and I know that on good days, I have the same huge, boisterous laugh as those two great women. That much doesn’t skip a generation.
…
Splitting
Count the rings, son:
That’s the years of growth
And the dark layers were bark,
Kept out the weather & cold.
This old tree had to learn
Which years to forget,
But deep inside, he still knows them.
I won’t lie, some were real, real bad—
Baby, it don’t matter now.
Your mamma’s cold in the house,
This tree had to die. So we can
Survive seasons of our own.
But don’t you think for a minute
That his growing was for nothing.
Look at your baby sister’s rosy cheeks
And the flame dancing in her eyes.
Look at you, boy, holding that ax
Getting so big, bigger than I was
At your age. I swear, son,
you’ll remember this day forever
even though you’ll forget it by tomorrow.
The Commonplace is Sacred
To write about something well is to write about something that is specific. This is to write about something with which you have spent a considerable about of time; not only something that has kept you quiet and solemn company on rainy nights, but that you have talked with, grappled with, something that can make you laugh or clench your teeth. To tell the truth is to tell of what you know and understand.
You cannot understand what you have not sat beside on the front step under the dim yellow porch light while swatting flies away.
You cannot understand what has not held your hand in the car on the way to the ER.
You cannot understand what you have not wrapped up in a soft towel and buried in the frozen earth on Christmas day.
You most certainly cannot understand what you haven’t shared a frozen pizza with at a table cluttered with bills and crusty dishes and cups with milk rings in the bottom.
Come sit beside me, child, and let me tell you again that the commonplace is sacred. And then you can tell me about the places and the people you sit with most often.
Onion Seeds
Planting Spanish onion seeds
On the floor in my garage
In black plastic trays
While you read aloud the story of an Alaskan teacher
Deliberately
Imagining our babies in a year or two
Their hair will be yellow curls
Their eyes will be either oceans or ponds
Imagine the potluck dinners
The baseball games at 6 p.m.
Mom and Dad will be in love
And will never hurt anyone again
Not under heaven’s golden sun
Not this spring
The Good Life and Where to Find It
My friends were in a computer screen and my dad let me stay in my room to talk to them, so long as I went to church the next morning. My grandma bought me flip flops and jean shorts and cheap flowered shirts. They talked about how lazy I was. I punched myself in the chest when it all got to be too much.
In my daydreams, I was a child in soldier’s clothes, carried off from my family and martyred in some proxy war. But I was a girl and the Holy Roman Empire didn’t want me. So I tried to get away by chasing boys and going to their basketball games late at night and kissing them when I thought they would like it. They were all lanky and quiet and sad. I was curly haired and a poet and vulnerable, still growing into my shoes. Some boys seemed kind, but their love for me was a riddle or a funny joke because they couldn’t even love themselves. They didn’t know how.
One day at a time, I grew up. School stopped being easy when everything had to be in APA format, and I often wanted to stay in bed and never wake up. Politics and people on the Internet made me angry, and I thought they should be beaten over the head with a Bible. I eventually realized that I was crazy because my family was crazy. At some point, I forgave them. When my dad dug in the garden, I helped him even though I was so tired, just because I hated to see him out there alone.
I slowly quit going to the Internet for advice and started going to sweet old ladies. They told me I knew in my heart what is right, so I said goodbye to an awkward, gifted boy who I adored and would’ve married but who refused to grow up. I went to bed earlier. I tried to listen to my preacher and my professors, even though I still mistrusted them. I stopped hating children and their joy and their innocence.
War is real in many places right now, and while I am safe in my little small town bubble, maybe my brother and his friends will have to answer the call of duty soon. For now, I’m planning my wedding to a blue collar man, writing research papers, and cooking suppers every day. The chickens peck and squawk and make babies out the window in the front yard. I go out and pull up the carrots from last fall and smile into the sunshine, grateful.
Grateful that my heart has been gently bruised to the point of softening. Loneliness will do horrible things to a child, but as an adult, every day I decide to make war with it. Sometimes, I choose to ignore my doubts.
I let my mind be conditioned to believe in the good life. I am so glad I that I did.
Feeling Frisky
Today at my house, the air is clean and so is the brown grass. You get off work early and drop by, red clay still on the knees of your jeans. Barefoot, we run to the steep hill where scraggly evergreens dot the field. We flop down together under the sleepy blue sky, and your arm reaches around my stomach. Your hands are rough, chapped from the wind, but it doesn’t bother me one bit.
In the winter, I tell you what I really think, and laugh loudly. You point to which clouds look like Robinhood and Little John, and when I disagree, you tickle my ribs. We are restless schoolchildren pining for summer.
After the last frost, I will take my little shovel and break sod for the cut flower garden. It’s for the wedding bouquets. It’s because I am convinced it’s a worthwhile endeavor to promise your life to someone. The white sun is hot as we daydream about cabins, dinner parties, and babies, but the chill of the damp ground keeps us from catnapping. Daylight is scarce.
Earlier this winter, we went to a funeral on my birthday. She was an old, old woman, an aunt of my mother’s. Behind that little mountain church, I held your hand, watching the grandchildren smoke cigarettes and play in the soggy patches of snow.
The generations of women before me are a heavy weight on my chest. You showed me a picture of your great-grandfather once, as he smiled beside his wife. The same softness is in your eyes now, and it brings me courage; I think this can be a good life. The air burns in my lungs this time of year, but somehow the promise of you numbs me, and warms me, and gives me a new strength.
Lying in the grass now, I trace your crow’s feet and whisper every name I’ve ever loved.
Like wild mustangs, we’re frisky in the winter, tossing our heads and turning quickly on our heels. Every decision— the lonely early mornings, the overtime graveyard shifts— drive us closer to a life, sometime soon, where you and I can run up the hills untethered. The sound of our galloping rings ever clearer.
Freshwater Pearls
Freshwater pearls in a tricolor string.
Yes, I’m the girl he’s buying the ring for.
Pearls are the last thing you put on
and the first thing you take off.
Funny to think I’ll have a stone on my hand,
then come summer, a silver wedding band.
’Til then, I wear three colors of pearls on a string,
it’s hard to believe that steady girl is me.
I’ve never had nothing so nice before.
How nice, how very nice, just to be looked after.
My mom watches my wrist, the pearls, when I’m getting ready,
and whatever the look is in her eyes, I don’t know it.
“He’s a good one, Mom.” Then, “I’m sorry, Mom.”
Through tears, “Well, who do you think prayed him into your life?”
Pearls lose their luster through contact with skin.
It’s best to store them in a silk pouch.
Tinker Cliff
Your sister lay on my lap
after we climbed the plateau.
She is sturdy but tired and
your flask hovers over her lips.
Your eyes are a deep, deep pond today,
searching the western horizon for clouds.
I stroke her hair as you once stroked mine
and her pale eyelids flutter with dreams.
The light is all shades of pink and
this is the type of place we would have danced.
I stop searching your face for comfort
and I whisper to your sister on my lap.
Don’t you know, little girl?
Your yes to one adventure
is a no to another.