Because It’s Sunday

That Sunday gloom has settled in on me, which is a common lifelong thing. I’ve learned to accept it as part of my genetic makeup, and I’ve learned to ride it out rather than seek solutions. Today’s somberness was probably brought on by an extended period of thought about my mother, that unknown and unknowable woman who shaped me and with whom I fought and argued all the days we had together. I was looking out at the leaves dropping from the branches and listening to Jinx snore softly at my feet, and I could see her so clearly, with her sad expression, and I wondered again at how she managed to put up a strong and sane front against the world down into which she was dropped. I can see her standing on that bumpy linoleum that covered the cold concrete slab floor of the little rental house with the Indian bones beneath it and the cardinals in the catalpa outside, her feet cold in cheap canvas tennies, her hands rough from the work and the water, her mind churning with worry about bills and how to feed them babies, them babies sitting there at the kitchen table reading their books and their funnybooks, there at the table near the open oven door with the flame on low because it heated the kitchen into a coziness like a king would have known, and we were all she had, all she had ever wanted, and she was so very alone.

I deliberately broke my own thoughts apart and went into the kitchen and turned on the radio, tuned to a channel from the little mountain station that we can pull in from Whitesburg, Kentucky, and I listened to some songs that warmed me like white liquor, soothed me like a feminine hand on the brow, calmed me like the last glimpse of sun before it buries itself in the western ground.

And because it’s Sunday, I thought I’d share the songs here. If you feel like sangin’, go ahead and sang. Won’t nobody mind.

~ S. K. Orr