Memoirs
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Hard Old Life, Part iii
Dear Mother, Gone are the days, and can this really be? Six years to this very day since I got the call and learned that you had slipped out of this life and into the next. My strongest memory of that day is not of a sense of grief, but rather the self-centered thought, “Now what do I do? I’m an orphan now.” And also, “I can’t talk to her anymore. Where did she go?” And that’s the question, isn’t it, Mother? Where did you go? I have no way of proving it to the satisfaction of the refrigerated bean-counters of today’s Christianity, but I know that sometimes you are…
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Happy Birthday, Sissy
Today is my sister’s birthday. The only human being in all creation who shares my DNA, my memories of our childhood, and the mysterious fabric of what it meant to be raised by our mother. Happy Birthday, Sissy. I love you very much. ~ Bubba
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Hard Old Life, Part ii
One hundred years ago today, my mother entered this life in a tiny hamlet called Adona, a thousand miles from where I now sit. She was the first child born to my grandparents Floyd and Willie Mae, and she never lived more than one hundred miles from the sharecropper’s shack in which she drew her first breath and opened her eyes. To my knowledge, she had exactly one birthday party in her life, an awkward affair hosted by my wife and me at her house in 2001, also attended by her daughter, her son-in-law, and all of her grandchildren. But that is another story for another time. ~ SKO Dear…
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Hard Old Life, Part i
Dear Mother, I can feel them even now as I set down these words. They are closer to me than some might think, and they are not at all silent. I am aware of their movement, and their songs are familiar to me, a collection of spinning alma mater, fully scored, richly orchestrated. When I was a small boy, you led me out into the hard-packed dirt of our front yard. The night was frigid and clear, and the moon was either new or hadn’t yet risen. It was just after midnight , and it was my birthday. You lifted your palms to the black sky with the sort of…
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Undertakings
Jinx and I were up before the sun lifted above the fog, and the air was as cool as an August morning’s can be, full of mist and memories and murmurs, and we set out for our stroll. On the way back, the sun pierced the fog and clattered down upon us in arrows and spears, and the birds sensed the change and their cries grew more boisterous and they began to swoop from tree to fence to building to post to rock. The gravel crunched beneath my shoes and a chipmunk scampered across my path, his tail held straight up. Jinx was looking in the other direction and I…
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I Want To
In the drowsy fine warm air of noon, a memory came to me. . These impressionist images from my maybe-it-happened mind come to me regularly, because my past is as efficient and wondrously tenacious as the manner in which plants distribute their seeds. The images and memories stick like burrs, or they float on easterly breezes, or they are carried by birds and dropped into the grassy expanse of my moments. What I remembered — and I invite you to search for a similar fragment in your own mind— was what it was like to mount my bike when I had neither Adams apple nor beard nor a hunger to…
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Content
When I stepped out onto the damp boards of the back deck before dawn, I could hear the spring frogs down in the holler, calling from the natural marsh of the stock pond. Dixee brushed past me out the door, pattering down the steps to relieve herself in the grass, and a cardinal in the pines warmed up, his chips and clicks crescendoing into a song of dark morning color. I saw the wisp of light in the eastern sky and longed to stay at the farm, longed to stay away from town, away from chattering voices and intrusive opinions and the moldy crumbs of civility that pass for conversation…
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Consummatum Est
In the last few years before her death, my mother talked to herself. Or rather, she talked to someone. Throughout my life, during her years on this earth, the kitchen was Mother’s place of abiding. She spent most of her waking hours within its warm, productive walls. In those last years before she passed from this life, whenever I was home with her, if I came into the kitchen quietly, I would often find her talking quietly as she worked. It seemed that she was talking to herself, but perhaps she was having a dialogue with God, or with an angel, or with a long-dead loved one. I do not…
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Under A Pink Moon
Have you ever noticed it? The way an approaching change in weather can be detected by all creatures beneath the gaze of heaven? Birds will skim the sweet grass, seeking insects before a drenching rain, and cows will lie down in the fields, resting the joints that the coming showers foretell in them, just as the stooped farmer feels the same ground-glass ache in his knotted knuckles. The very trees seem to face the wind and cross their arms, wondering if this will be the toppling day, or if tomorrow will see them still stretching above the quilt of still things, the soil and dirt that listen, that are aware,…
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Memories Of My Dog
Some years ago, there was a television commercial for cheese, an ad in which people were shown doing all sorts of risky and humorous things in order to acquire a piece of golden cheddar. At the end of the commercial, a mellow male voice would intone, “Behold the power of cheese.” We saw this power in action a few times with our dog Bonnie. One wintry day several years ago, Bonnie was outside exploring. My wife heard her run up onto the back deck, and so she went to let the dog in. When she opened the door, she saw Bonnie holding the rear half of a large rabbit in…