I wish we could have rewound time and been other people. We could have been strangers having a drink in an airport bar, formed a friendship that lasted through relationships and kids. We could have been neighborhood kids who grew up together, suffered through parental rules and high school. Or maybe, just neighbors who watched out for each other, swapping stories and checking in while bringing in trash bins.
At the very least, perhaps we could have pretended to be other people for a time, for a week or two— erasing past foot prints, created new ones in some distant soil. All the while, we could have worn different faces. You could have chosen the mother’s face you’d have liked to have worn. And I could have chosen a daughter’s face that perhaps wasn’t some reminder of what you wanted to forget or ignore.
If we could have worn different faces, made new footprints in different places-- Perhaps our burdens of rage and loss and fear would have drifted away like runaway balloons at a child’s birthday party long before that day in July that haunts me still when I had to reach down to close your frightened eyes.
I want to preserve your stories. The stories you told of how you grew up in the poverty of West Virginia during the Great Depression. I want your granddaughter to know them, to absorb the wisdom they contain.
Since it is near a pivotal mid-term election, I am reminded of your story about importance of voting. I heard you tell this story so many times I memorized your words, and so I will let your words tell the story—
“It was early November. Don’t remember the date or day. I was about nine years old when it happened. Back up in the mountains, in the hollers*, people would to cook food for a family where someone was ill or if the woman had just had a baby, and the kids, like around my age then, we’d deliver it.
It was my mother’s turn to make a food bundle for a neighbor family in the holler. The woman had just given birth a little while ago but was suffering with sickness after. So that afternoon, my mother sent me up there with a pot and a bundle of food for the family. I had no trouble going down the road to deliver the food. But it seemed such a long way. It was already twilight by the time I got there to deliver the food.
So, on the way back, I decided going through the woods would be quicker. But I’d never been through the woods. I ended up getting all turned around and couldn’t find my way back to the road. By that time, it was pitch dark. I was so scared. I heard something that sounded like a big animal, a bear or something, so I climbed up a tree where I thought it would be safe. It was damn cold that night too.
I was scared. I was cold. I knew my mother was going to be pissed off. Early in the morning, it must have been just as it was getting light, I heard all these people calling for me. I could hear my father above all of the others. I shimmied down that tree so happy to be found. I yelled out. My father was the first to reach me. He scooped me up. My mother, she was lightening mad. She was rambling on about teaching me a lesson about not running off like that. She took out her little knife she always had in her apron pocket and cut a switch off a tree. She grabbed me from my father and said I needed a good whippin’. Now, my father, he usually let my mother do the disciplinin’ of us kids because he was always working in the mines or traveling to find work in other mines or farms. But not that day. He swept me up and grabbed my mother’s wrist as she started to drawback, and he said, ‘Renie, ain’t nobody gonna whip any of my kids today! Nobody! Even you, their Mama. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected our president yesterday, so today we’re gonna celebrate that because we got somethin’ to hope for.’ My mother dropped her switch and kept her head down as my father carried me home. The rest of the people took off to their homes.
And we did. We had hope. Took time but things started to get better little by little.”
Then we would watch the Watergate hearings and you would throw your house slipper at the 13-inch black and white television sitting on the kitchen buffet, ranting about how you couldn’t understand why people would vote for a crook like Nixon especially when Marylanders knew Agnew was a damn crook from the start and birds of a feather and all.
Your rant always ended with “that’s why you vote. Keep the crooks out. Get good people in who care about us. Not these guys who wanna line their pockets.” By then you may have knocked back a six pack, but there is no denying that you were right, Mom. You were absolutely right.
*holler- hollow, I know. But my mother and aunt always said holler so I use her words as this is her story.
I hold a handful of pomegranate seeds— I think of you all I know and do not know--
A bushel of grapefruits arrive at the front door. The next day, a bushel of oranges followed by a bushel of pomegranates, like tribute foretelling the arrival of some dignitary or prince. Every summer, the bushels foreshadowed your visits-- The grapefruits and oranges for my mother, who loved all citrus, a luxury she didn’t have growing up in West Virginia. The pomegranates for me-- You knew I loved them. Why did the bushels and the visits stop after the summer I turned six?
These seeds I hold, ready to throw into today’s salad, are too few—
I remember you— showing me how to open a pomegranate; teaching me to count in Greek; moving a stepstool to the counter so I could climb and see how to make Greek yogurt from scratch, when you saw my nose wrinkle at the smell, telling me, “You will like it because you Greek,” your accent as thick and heavy as the clabbered milk in the yogurt glasses.
The last summer you came to visit— A train ride to Florida to stay the whole summer with you and Aunt Mae. I wanted the top bunk in the train car. You tucked me into the lower one saying, “You fall here. No hurt. You fall from up there, you hurt,” before hefting yourself into the top bunk. You said you’d teach me to swim. “Everybody in Greece swim. I teach you. You learn easy because—” you paused, waiting-- for my six-year-old excitement to finish, “I’m Greek!” You tousled my hair then loaded our things in the car.
Everything to be tried, to be learned, to be shown required our liturgical call and response: you would start, “You will like because—" and I would finish, “I’m Greek.”
Teaching me to swim didn’t work out too well— You told me to move my arms and legs fast, then threw me into the ocean. Each time I flailed and sank. Each time you pulled me up, “You okay. You learn.” The third or fourth throw, You pulled me up And said, “Enough today. But you learn because—” And despite my fearful sobbing, I finished, “I’m Greek,” as I wrapped my arms around your neck. We did not have time. I never learned.
Sirens, red lights, dark outside, Aunt Mae crying. The hospital cold, noisy. Mae on the phone. Mommy coming on the train.
You lived. Came home. Peeled me a pomegranate.
Mom and I left on the train. The last time I saw you, Uncle Pete, though you did not die until three months after my high school graduation, an obituary found on the internet tells me so. But the bushels, the visits, the phone calls stopped the summer I turned six. I never knew why. I will never know now.
Fifty-nine years after that summer with you, I stand holding a handful of pomegranate seeds, shining their ruby glow. Decades since last I split open a pomegranate. Too easy to buy in plastic tubs now. I need to finish this salad.
But I am stilled in the moment— The truth I now know— sleuthing through scraps of internet information after a DNA test-- What neither of us may have known that one summer, We were/ are father and daughter.
Your lies hang,
apricots swaying
in the summer air
from the tree
of your despair.
You pick the ripest apricots
to make jam
you ladle into small jars,
gifting them to friends
who smile softly,
touched you think of them
by gifting your small jars of jam
made from the apricots
you pick from the tree
of all your despair
denied.
What would I learn
Could I raise your bones
From the earth?
And like some ancient medicine woman
Scatter them like runes to read
Or use them in the making
Of a sacred instrument
To rattle next to my ear?
What would their music tell me?
Would their rhythms move me?
Would there be some wisdom spoken?
Hidden within the notes of rattled rhythms
Of all your dried out unearthed bones
Is there enough marrow left to have
All my ancestors speak to me?
Should I, in some ancient tribal ritual
Of ancestral cannibalism,
Ingest your ground bones
Mixed with magic into an elixir
Infused with your ancestral spirits,
Be given the power of thunder
And lightening that is your strength
Earned by you through the ages?
Is this how your spirits will travel through me
Teaching me of all the earth and sky?
Is there a way to know, to learn
To hear all the secrets you deem I need,
Need to know in this time, this place
For this, this last chapter
Of what I have left to me?
My ancestors, for I have wasted
Away pages and chapters,
Squandered decades of the anthology
You have written into me.
Ancestors, speak to me,
So I waste not the years
Left to be written
By your spirits into me.
In her grandchildren, her spirit is woven– What a tapestry These children create.
The strongest fibers of her determination run In the eldest, wearing her grandmother’s face, Though she never knew her.
Threads of her courage and strength Weave into the only one who knew her, Who can remember the smell of her beef stew, As the grown child wages a battle for her life.
Yarns of responsibility and fun spin In the lone grandson, As he raises his son And forgets not how to play.
The delicate fine threads of her caring and her dreams Spin through the twins, Born too late to know her, One doing what must be done to care for others. the other creating a business of her art.
The warm, soft yarn of her love and generosity weaves through the youngest, my daughter, Born under the same December sun, As she becomes a nurse caring For babies born too early.
In my mother’s grandchildren, A tapestry of faith is woven, And I am taught DNA is more than science, Woven with soul upon Some ancient loom. This tapestry of spirit Where my mother lives still.
Spun out from the centrifuge
Twisted in helix meaning
Strands entwined, twisted back
Stretching toward history within heritage
Search through the montage of time
Sift through pounds of truth and lies
For a few ounces of purity
Measured out within the mess
The now was the past
Where to walk
We travel back
On twisted helix roads
To the selves we were
So very long ago
And learn
The future braided
In the past
With the now
And made us whole
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