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EARTH WOMEN
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Four a.m. this morning, I’m frosting cupcakes for my daughters to take to school. I am one among many Earth women who wear the cape, as Mother did when career-minded was a venial sin. A mother of four, her teaching degree was traded for a 30-year membership in the secretarial pool of the state’s agriculture and purchasing departments. Her check bought groceries, laundry detergent and Christmas presents. At four a.m., my mother’s cape resembled a fuzzy, white robe with missing bodice button. Kitchen hums of Nearer My God to Thee and Would You Like to Swing on a Star did nothing to lure me back to sleep. I secretly watched her knead yeast and flour into the large, yellow bowl used only for bread dough. With each push, tug or turn of floury paste, her worn suede slippers, with flat, fleece lining, shifted against the linoleum like salt shakers. Knead and tuck. Knead and tuck. Turn the bowl and knead, then tuck. Cinnamon rolls with icing, buns soaked in butter or French toast in stacks covered the breakfast table. My sister and I would lap up the syrup or lick off the frosting while Mother sifted through a clean laundry basket and pulled thighs into pantyhose — a regular Lois Lane.
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CELEBRATION
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Far from the yellowing glow of bugs in backyard farm light, sister and I lie listening, our bodies ‘tween blanket and sky. A concerto of crickets, whispers from maples, faint call of a wandering calf. Our teenage minds muddle our own insignificance yet that which seems so monumental. Boys and our brother, parents and Providence, which Dipper contains the North Star. We point out the paths of firefly flicker, paint stories 'bout car passersby. We giggle with nonsense at jokes without humor and laugh that we giggled at all. Old sparklers add brizzle of burning magnesium; our names disappear in their flare. The cool air gives goosebumps. Talk turns sporadic. It’s time to fold up, go in.
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MY LAST CHILDHOOD
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In mother’s Indian sweater, I stand next to you holding seashells on an Atlantic beach in Jacksonville. The afternoon is as grey as the ocean behind us that layers the sand like frosting then disappears under itself. It is one of three photos I have of you and me together. Your black cowboy boots, polished; your brown leisure suit hangs like Sunday on your frame. This is a special occasion, this trip to Florida, where you spoke to your peers about arresting those who drive high. This is the trip where I called mother names in my diary, rolled my eyes until they were sore. The trip where I stared at the penis of a man standing alone behind our hotel near a dumpster. The trip where I ate shrimp and grew three years while sitting in a Louisiana hotel window, feeling jazz for the first time. The trip where we detoured through Kentucky’s dew green pastures blotted with chestnut thoroughbreds, then swallowed our stares at the busted clapboard shacks thrown like black checkers away from Georgia’s white money. You called it a family trip, pretending it was as fun as the journeys we took with my sisters and brother to Wyoming and California, those two-week, summer vacations where every night meant a new K.O.A. campground. I remember it as the trip of my last childhood.
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