Dirt

 

I remember Grandad's holding his hand sideways and spreading his thumb and index finger four inches. "Set them about this far apart," he said, and he handed me a little brown bag of bulbs, leaving me to my row.

When I think of dirt, I think of my hands planting these, my grandad's onions, and how--having already set and covered the bulbs of his own row--he'd be leaning on his hoe in wait by the time I got to the end of my row. Then he'd work his way back up my row, putting the little onions to bed by covering and patting with his well-worn hoe. Dirt in springtime.

I think of his and Grandma's waving from their porch next door as, in autumn, I followed the plow pulled slowly by Dad's tractor across our garden. I plucked potatoes from the ground and plunked them into the bucket I carried, breathing in the cool air and the basic, beautiful smell of the stirred-up earth.

I think of lifting my horse's hooves and picking them clean, popping out rocks and scraping away dirt. I think of patting her hindquarters and seeing the dust rise in a cloud, of combing dried mud from her coat and tail. It brought me peace. More than twenty years later, I miss her so deeply I can hardly stand to look at another.

I think of digging for worms and of the dark, moist dirt that filled the edges of my fingernails and clung stubbornly to my palms: how there's a wholesomeness, sometimes, that makes dirt very nearly clean. I think how I'm unafraid of the oxymoron.

I think of wanting my children to know dirt as more than what I fail to sweep from the kitchen floor, so--one evening, when Rachel was sad--I allowed them freshly-bathed into her dirt pile. I watched as they marveled at such blessed filth. I listened to her laugh into the crisp air and remembered simpler times.

**writing in community with Nacole

Hands

My friend Anjie took this photo just over a year ago, at my maternal grandmother's 95th birthday party. There's another like it, somewhere, with my older daughter's hand instead of my younger daughter's, but I treasure this particular photo for many reasons, and--given Nacole's prompt of "hands"--I thought I'd try to write them out.

The gold rings on Grandma's hand--which she'd worn since the 1930's--were stolen by a nurse after Anjie took this photo. The nurse stole them from Grandma's dresser, or so she says, and took them to a pawn shop, where they were melted. This photo reminds me to pray for that nurse.

Mom's worn her rings my entire life plus four years, and when I say that, I mean I can't really recall having ever seen her hand without them; unlike me, she wears her rings to fulfill daily tasks. I remember fiddling with them, turning them around and around on her finger while she read to me. They're loose where they live low on her finger but can't be easily slid over the joint: all the knuckle-cracking, she says, when she was younger.

The similarities between Grandma's and Mom's hands stand out to me, in this photo, but my hand is nothing the same; I have Dad's hands. My ring finger, in fact, is at least three sizes larger than Mom's, and I have the trademark, crooked index fingers of a Shafer. (Incidentally, Grandad Shafer was missing a center finger on one hand, and as the story goes, he left the Church of God--which didn't believe in seeking medical attention--just after he lost his finger.)

I've bitten my nails as long as I've had teeth, and have mercy, I've had to give up the other bad habits one by one, so I'm hoping to keep the nail-biting one. On my left hand, I bear small scars from the time I flipped a car near Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Anjie may have edited those out.

When my husband bought my engagement ring, it was the most expensive purchase he'd ever made. I still think about that, sometimes: his uncharacteristic extravagance. I consider that most every out-of-character thing he's ever done has been tied up in me somehow, and my mouth turns up in one corner.

He bought my other ring, silver, for a song. I'd never worn two rings on one finger until the mailman delivered that band with its six differently-colored birthstones, one for each of us. My heart thrills every time I look at it: a reminder of the miracle that we're all as here as we'll ever be.

Charleigh's little hand looks exactly as mine did some thirty-seven years ago. Of the four children, she's the only one with hands like mine...all the way down to the bitten nails. She's wearing Anjie's turquoise ring in this photo, which reminds me of my friend's eye for a good shot and, more importantly, of her huge heart that loves us so much.

Evergreen

I went unnoticed by man most all my life. It seems he appreciates rarely a thing as it is; he wants to make a thing from a thing, and--although I can't explain it, entirely--I know he overlooked me because I didn't inspire his art. He preferred harder things, shadier things, all manner of other things. I didn't let it get to me.

Instead, I concentrated on putting down roots and growing, on becoming a stronger and fuller version of myself. I didn't travel, but my tiniest pieces took flight upon the very breath of God. I learned the secrets of the sun and the swivel-headed, traveling owl. I became a haven for those smaller and weaker than I.

At last, man came for me. Winter had been harsh, and the others were fallen or, at very least, naked; for the first time in my life, I stood out in my full, green dress. Man gave me the up'n'down. I saw admiration burning in his eyes.

Then he cut me abruptly off from myself and dragged me from everything I'd ever known.

He confined me in a hot place, made a mockery of my natural beauty by draping me with a gaudy scarf and covering me with cheap baubles. He offered me a sad pan of water from which to drink, but I could feel myself starting to die.

I fell apart gradually. He gathered up my bits and tossed them into the fire until, one day, he stripped me of the tacky accessories and kicked me to the curb.

The acknowledgment of man (ax murderer!) stole my life. I lost myself (my ever, along with my green). I became no thing. No thing at all.

***Joining Nacole in writing out "evergreen."

The Dress

.

If it happened during first grade, and I'm pretty sure it did, my mother was yet in her 20's, and it's strange to think of the rapid, woodpecker ratatattat of her Singer, her foot on the brown floor pedal, that other foot--the silver one--gleaming proud of its colored thread under the yellow spotlight in the belly of the machine.

Because I'm 38 and ain't never sewn a thing.

She loved to sew but did it in stolen moments, mostly, and I do recall bugging the snot out of her to please abandon her project and get me a drink, a snack; play me a game; pay attention (in general) to me, I'm dying of boredom.

But she had this way, and still very much does, of managing a person and her woes. Back then, she sent me on missions impossible (I'll bet you can't find such-n-such and bring it to me before I count to three thousand!) to get me out of her hair, and I reckon it was a sad day when, all atiptoe, I startled her into resuming the counting she'd done only when I'd been within earshot.

She'd been busted (her great game ended), but even after, she never yelled. She chased me around the house with a cake turner every now and again, but she always ended up laughing too hard to actually spank me.

She's sewn me a hundred dresses, but the Strawberry Shortcake one, in particular, comes to mind. I loved the character second only to Blueberry Muffin and picked out the fabric myself. I could hardly wait to wear the dress, and I really tried, for once, to leave my poor mother in peace, hunched with her creation over her machine.

The day at last came, and I stepped proud as punch onto that yellow school bus wearing my Strawberry Shortcake dress, white tights, scuffed Buster Brown shoes, and pink ribbons in my ponies.

And other kids made fun of my "babyish" dress all day long so that--by the time my mother swung wide the door, that afternoon--my eyes were red-rimmed, my nose dripping. I can recall as though it were yesterday her crouching and folding me in, asking: "What's wrong?"

I remember sobbing into her shoulder and blubbering about the other kids, and then? her saying: "My goodness. What were they thinking? Well, let's just take this dress off and hang it in the closet. You don't have to wear it. ever. again. Come on; let's change clothes and get a snack."

And there are so many things to do today, on this day, in this time and place. I haven't showered; the house is as if a bomb went off (yet again); the small group will be here at 6:30 (I really should bake cookies!); and I'm likely to be up until midnight helping Cade finish his science-fair display. But nothing feels more important to me, in this rare moment of quiet, than to say:

This is not a Dolly-Parton-coat-of-many-colors story. I never wore that dress, again. But I've saved it all these years in hopes that, someday, I'd have a daughter stronger than I was, then. Or that, someday, I'd be a fraction of the mother mine was while yet in her 20's.

**writing in community with Tanya and friends

The Instrument

This flautist spent a couple months of my fourth-grade year thinking I may well be losing my mind.

I wore my zippered backpack on my back even while riding that dusty, yellow bus with its barely-padded, vinyl, dark green seats. I had an assigned seat mate: Robin. She lived in the cul-de-sac. She didn't much comb her hair or wash her coat: tough as nails, she was, even in elementary school. I carried a book for reading, always, and just tried to mind my own business.

One day, I stepped off the bus in front of the school, and suddenly, inexplicably, the front of my backpack fell open, and all my books and papers and folders and things hit the sidewalk just at my heels. I remember, still, the humiliation: sliding my backpack off my shoulders and clutching it in front of me, stooping in my dress to scoop up my stuff and jumble-cram it into my bag. A few of my papers blew on a breeze under the bus.

I couldn't believe I'd forgotten to zip my backpack, and it wasn't long after that I started to lose things: a pack of school pictures, a library book. I still remember which: Sylvia Cassedy's Behind the Attic Wall. I loved that book.

And then, one day, I lost my flute. I'd zipped it into my backpack, but--when I got home--the zipper was about eight inches open at the top, and the instrument was gone. And suddenly, I knew (don't ask me how): Robin had snaked that flute right out my backpack.

When Daddy got home from work, I told him all about it. "Are you sure?" he asked, and I nodded. "Well," he said, "get in the truck. We'll go get it back."

Minutes later, Daddy was knocking on the door of Robin's house in the cul-de-sac. I stood beside him, my hands crammed deep in my coat pockets against the cold and dark. Robin's daddy answered the door. "I believe your daughter has my daughter's flute," Daddy said. He never has been one to much beat around the bush.

Robin's daddy frowned and called for Robin's mama. She came to the door. "Robin come home with a flute?" Robin's daddy asked her.

Robin's mama looked from her husband to my daddy and back again. "She did," she said, bewildered. "Told me the band instructor was letting her borrow it."

Robin's daddy shook his head. "It belongs to this little girl," he said, nodding toward us. "Y'all come in."

Robin's mama left their dim, little living room and came back with the flute. Daddy and I thanked her kindly and climbed back in the truck. He didn't say another word, just reached over and squeezed my leg right above the knee.

A week or so later, Holly from the cul-de-sac handed me my library book. "I knew you were looking for it," she said, "and I found it at Robin's house. She must really like you; your pictures are all over her room."

**Writing in community with Tanya and friends. Source of image.

The Cupboard

Source

I miss my grandmothers, and I miss my grandmothers' houses. I miss the cupboards in my grandmothers' houses, and how I pretty much knew where everything was or went, and how--on the off chance I didn't--I could dig around and through every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I miss the dishes of the cupboards in the houses of my grandmothers. The white dishes at Grandma Shafer's had a matching pattern: green with Chinese huts on stilts, or some such. I'd know it in an instant if you put it in front of me. Glass glasses there, too, and we used them even as children: our spoons stirring chocolate syrup up from the bottoms like silver fish disrupting sand. I can almost hear my spoon tinkle against the glass like a quiet, little bell.

If dishes were breakable at Grandma Shafer's, they were non or chipped at Grandma Blickenstaff's but just as good, and my dishes, today, are like Grandma B.'s: mismatched and funny-stacked. 

It matters less what's in a cupboard, I think, than how willing one is to see those doors swung wide by others. Whom will you allow to get up in your cupboards, and in how many cupboards do you know your way around? I know my mother's, of course, and I'm learning my mother-in-law's. I've been in Terye Jo's for the pink, aluminum tumbler she keeps for me, and I'd enter Christy's without a second thought, but it's worth that second thought.

Because I've fooled myself into believing I've established intimacy that isn't there. I've looked over those few who know my cupboards for folks ain't never been in my house, and I see suddenly: I have a need that can't be satisfied that way.

Call me if you want to come over for ice cream. I have black cherry. Chips on the rims of my bowls.

**Writing in community with Tanya and friends.

The Path

Say to me the word path, and I'll see the cut-through Mr. Mike and my dad made, clearing out brush and brambles, knocking down trees so Ben and Anna, my brother and I, could walk between houses and away from the road. Say path; I'll remember how private it was: tramped clean, ever after, by eight small feet.

Hear our happy voices; see our swinging arms. Nothing in the world better than walking through the woods to the house of a friend.

Say path, and I'll see my mother playing tennis, lifting her arm with its racquet in hopes of the return. We children danced away through hedges on a snaking line of dust. No one ever tried to snatch us or lure us with candy. An amphitheater and three playgrounds. Tetherball, crawling barrel tunnel, swings. Sand.

Say path, and I'll remember riding bareback from the meadow, her body barely fitting betwixt the narrow trees. I laid my head against her neck to duck the bending branches, and we belonged to one another. I've never been closer to God.

Say path, and I'll see my daughter running in the winter: her cheeks pink roses, her mouth an upward curve.

**writing in community with Amber and friends

The Boy

"That little feller reminds me of me, when I was his age," he says, and I know he's talking--at least in part--about the weight, but he adds: "I remember Mom cutting my hair from under a bowl she'd stuck on my head."

I've thought many times, over the years: I would've loved Jimmy as a little boy; I know I would've.

He was 23 (almost or freshly) when I met him but still very much a boy: no pot to piss in. He borrowed money from one of buddies to buy me two roses. He had a box of sidewalk chalk, a box of Snow White Valentines like what little girls swap with their friends, pumpkin-carving skills. He gave me the up-n-down in class and didn't care a bit to bellow his love for me across the commons.

I played him hard, and finally he took off for Disney World. He didn't come back to me for a dozen years; I'm not even kidding you.

When he came back, at last, he came back a man.

Lately, though (as he loses weight rapidly), I've seen glimpses of the boy again. Overall, I can't say I've been terribly amused: probably because I can't even locate my inner girl at the moment. She might be lost in a pile of dirty laundry, or she might be trapped behind this guy:

Not sure, but I find: I don't really want Jim out of my sight. I leaned across the bar, last night, and told him: "I'm always afraid you won't come back. Or that you won't want to."

I listened from bed, this morning, to his doling out vitamins and juice to the girls (who sound, afar, just like Minnie Mouse). He climbed the stairs, crawled in beside, and said: "They're watching cartoons, but you've only got about ten minutes before they get into some craziness."

I laughed, assured him I was awake before pulling him close and breathing him (fresh from the shower) in. I asked him to stay, but he had a meeting, so I listened to his goodbyes with the girls, also to the squeak and click of the door.

And I wonder if he understands how much of me he takes with him, when he goes, how he is the axis upon which I (big and round as a library globe) spin.

**My thanks to Amber Haines for the prompt. Pleased to share with her and her community.

The Stairs

I never imagined how fine the needles: finer than pine; finer than silver loops topping vintage Christmas ornaments; finer, even, than threads of silk hanging, unraveling, from those balls.

I can't do it, I thought, when she said: "Prick your finger fours times a day."

I can't do it, I thought, when he said: "Give yourself a shot every morning." Crying, I picked up my beloved's cell and dialed "Brother," wanting mine, getting his. But that was almost four years ago, and, as it turns out, I can do all things; my body has produced two healthy girls since that time.

I prick my fingers over and over with fine needles and cross my fingers for insulin because my body's become a grinding food processor. I eat a cheeseburger, no bun, for breakfast and feel the lurch, the protesting engine, of my body. I yawn on the couch. I sit on a stool to wash dishes. I sing from a chair in the choir loft, the others standing around me like golf tees on a Cracker Barrel Peg Puzzle.

I broke my tailbone, once, falling down stairs. The doctor prescribed pain meds (How does one take pain meds while mothering a toddler and driving two hours, each way, for grad school?) and time. I befriended a donut pillow.

Interesting, those pains in the ass that cannot be seen.

I am ready to put a needle in the hand of my beloved and bend over.

David Salle's Flying Down, 2006

**My thanks to Tess Kincaid and Amber Haines for the prompts that inspired this post. I am pleased to share with them and their communities.

The Necklace

Fifteen years ago, in Dallas, I approached a well-respected tattoo artist about a wedding ring of ink. He shrugged, said he didn't tattoo fingers because of their constant exposure to the elements. He went on to say: most people don't get the touch-ups finger tattoos require, and their faded ink reflects poorly upon the artists.

I'm sure I could've found someone to tattoo my finger but didn't pursue it further, and thank goodness, because the marriage ended. My ex-husband's band felt heavy in every sense; I wore it infrequently while we were married, and (no surprise) never, after. It brought a pretty penny when I sold it, a few years ago, for gold.

These days, I wear my wedding ring like I wear my flip-flops, which is to say: I slip it off when I'm in the house. This means nothing except that I prefer bare fingers for washing dishes and children, for preparing food, for sleeping.

As a matter of respect, I try to remember to slide that ring back on before leaving the house, but I wear jewelry best, it seems, when I can forget it's there. I prefer necklaces, and--over the course of my lifetime--there have been a long line of them.

I think of the one my mom gave me from my infant brother: candy-looking hearts on a chain, from Avon.

My dad presented a slightly older me with a gold heart, an opal heart nestled inside it. "I keep your heart inside my heart," he said. After I'd grown, he replaced that necklace with the heart of white gold I wore on my (second) wedding day.

While my beloved and I honeymooned on St. John, he bought me a silver book on a chain. The pages inside, engraved by Kathy Bransfield, bear the last stanza of William Ernest Henley's "Invictus."  We hear the tapping of those silver pages and return to a hotel room by the Caribbean Sea.

I have two necklaces that celebrate my children on earth, and the one I wear, typing this, memorializes my child in heaven. 

I write in necklace places and feel lighter: like I'm wearing a necklace and not a millstone. I scatter and scratch and spill and vomit words on pages and know: I will not drown, today. I have said everything I need to say.

**Sharing with Amber, Emily, and their communities.

The Cup

When someone drinks from a cup, she drinks from something other than glass because--if she drinks from glass--she'll either call that container by the name of its substance, or she'll call it a mug: not, generally, a cup. I prefer to drink from glass: especially wine, also sweet tea and most anything with fizz to it.

A glass seems cleaner, somehow, than a cup. Cups (especially plastic ones) trap odors and stains. Ice doesn't taste so good, out of a cup, as it does from a glass. Perhaps nothing does.

Cups haven't that charming ring when tapped with silverware; they're insufficient for toasts.

Cups melt, sometimes, but they don't tend to break. Cups are safe and--let's face it--childish. Undignified. They're sold in spill-proof varieties. They house Kool-Aid, medicine, pee.

Aside from a few juice glasses and mugs, in this log cabin, we drink from only cups: plastic cups. My husband prefers Big Gulp cups from 7-Eleven. Cade, my 12-year-old, seems to like the tall, skinny black cups with fading owls on them. They belonged to my grandma and remind me of the days when she had her own house, cupboards, cups. The girls drink from sippy cups: Sesame Street, Mickey Mouse, Tinkerbell, various princesses.

I'm indifferent. I drink from whatever cup is clean. I prefer to drink from glass (Were you paying attention?) but suspect that this season of cups is meant to draw me closer to Jesus.

Jesus is a cup man. There are those who would try to capture Him in glass; trap Him in glass; make Him as transparent/dangerous/cutting/fancy-schmancy as glass, but He's a cup man. Scripture bears it out.

"Suffer the little children to come unto me," Jesus says, and I'll tell you the truth: I don't think He minds if the children come carrying sippy cups. Nor do I think He minds if their mommies come running behind with little cups of medicine. Jesus loves little people with sugar highs, Kool-Aid mustaches, medicine breath. He loves, too, the mommies behind them.

Jesus takes the cup; gives thanks; tells His followers to drink His blood out of it. It's shed for the remission of sins, He says.

Jesus loves the kids, the sinners, ordinary (wo)men. He loves us here, in this log cabin, drinking from cups. He's right here. He's a cup man.

**Sharing with Amber, Emily, and their communities.