square of earth

Grandpa used to take out his guitar, and sing to us in Spanish. The strings were not tuned, and he crooned into the dusty air at the house on West Summit. There was the Spanish lady painting with the rose and the cleavage that peeked out between the red and black lace of her bodice. She looked on with deep, black eyes and Grandpa sang of amor y la vida. Sometimes he would come and sit on the plastic chair in the backyard and watch us play on the rusty playset that rattled when you swing, threatening to pull off of the ground. On hot days you had to slide down the metal slide with a towel, cotton shorts and barefeet. Sometimes, he would give us strips of wax paper that would send us sailing off the lip of the slide into the dirt and grass.
The pecan tree, ancient and wide, stood above the house and littered speckled nuts all over the back lawn. We used pickers--long metal sticks with a spiraled basket on the end. If you shoved it hard over a nut, it would squeeze through and lay in your basket. The sisters ran around the lawn carefully picking up pecans and puring the basket into an open H-E-B bag--souvenirs from West Summit. If you took a pecan and smashed it in a cracker, you could use your nails to dig into the sharp shell and pull out the meat. My mama told me that once when she was little, she sat on her porch on a Friday during Lent and ate the meat of a pecan only to stop with wide eyes at eating meat on a Friday during Lent--Catholic doctrine from the mouths of babes.
Grandpa had a small garden behind the garage. It was a square of earth jammed packed with rose bushes and irises, surrounded by a curtain of honeysuckle. With a warm, toothy smile Grandpa cut me the stem of a fat, purple iris with the caterpillar pollen crawling down the petals. If I was lucky, there were a few buds attached that would spread open a few days later while sitting in a glass on the counter of our kitchen.
The day I went to see him in the hospital, I was 15. It was his birthday. There was a cake, candles, and singing. All the siblings were there, but he was not awake. I started crying and I couldn't control the bad feeling that tightened in my stomach and stopped up my throat. His kidneys had failed and so his body was bloated and stretched. I can remember his hands and that they were fat and that I could probably pop them if I tried to touch them. I didn't want to look at him, he didn't look the same. At the funeral, Mama told me to go and politely look at the open casket and I refused and she made me and I made a vow that my shell of a body would never lie in a casket for everyone to look at. I will never be able to change the last image of my Grandpa--preserved and pinched. A relative sang a song, accompanied by a karaoke machine. The picture of Grandpa in his 20 something sailor suit smiled back and his ears stuck out.

watermelon pink

My mother sews.
She has a watermelon pink heavy metal sewing machine with a pedal that is attached to the inside of the table. If you want the needle to start pumping you press the outside of your thigh into the pedal and the purring fills the room, and faintly touches the rooms next door. I don’t remember a time when I did not fall asleep to the faint sounds of my mother waist deep in some new project--her cheeks watermelon pink from the warmth of her table lamp and the stuffy air filled with thread fuzz.
One straight line of stitching purred out from beneath needle, then she stopped, clicked up the foot, cut the thread, and aligned the needle along the grain of another path. Purr, stop, click, cut, click, purr.
Our house is filled with every tool of the trade. Mama made her sister’s wedding dress when she was 16, with the same watermelon pink machine that sits in her bedroom now. She started with 10 cent patterns with pictures of tall, skinny girls in hotpants and jumpsuits with Farrah Faucett hair. She still has those patterns. She still has everything. Our house is a wonderland of thread and buttons, ribbon and lace. I came home from school my freshmen year to find I had been replaced. My drawers were filled with fabric. My desk and closet were filled with fabric. She has every pattern and every texture, and they come from all over the world and from every decade. This summer I pulled out a piece of vintage lace and I held it up to her face asking if it was up for grabs. Her face fell and I knew that she must be saving it for something special. That is when I learned my mother’s secret:
The reason she has so much fabric is because she gets attached- to the fabric itself. Once you make something out of it then it is gone, worn, out of style, lost. So, she has them folded in stacks, in boxes, in shelves, drawers and closets. She has them in closets- like a closet love affair, a secret love affair. My mother has a secret love affair with her fabrics.

starry night

I haven't decided how I want to treat this blog. It feels awkward to write about day to day, when I am so used to a pen and journal. Eh...
Yesterday, Daddy and I talked about writing and the importance of being honest when it comes to personal essays or memoirs. It is not so much the honesty of the details, as it is the honesty in your reflections. I am in a creative non-fiction class right now, and it is probably the best thing that has ever happened to my writing. I am trying to get over my tendency to wrap things up in a bow, and to stop writing with an ending in mind. It has been fun to just word-vomit onto a page and sort it out later. It is especially easy when it comes from your own life.
This is just a short excerpt from an essay I turned in a few weeks ago. It is for you, Daddy. I am so glad that you found something that you enjoy doing, I really do enjoy reading your entries. And, I hope that you really do write like you plan to--I can't wait to read all of your stories.

"We lived at 3426 Maitland, in a two-story gray brick, at the very center of a line of identical homes. On those warm summer nights when the cicadas would sing above the heat, my daddy would throw “star parties” for the neighborhood. There were tangled strands of Christmas lights and blankets and lawn chairs and Daddy would set up his telescope on the slant of our front driveway. We would wait anxiously as he scanned the sky for celestial importance, the lens of his glasses softly tapping against the eyepiece. The adults would sit in lawn chairs sipping cold 7-Up and talking about the street lamp across the street that blocked out half the sky. Standing on tiptoe, the children of Maitland witnessed the universe magnified and million and one times through that glass lens. We saw Jupiter’s spots swirling like a tiny hurricane, and Saturn’s rings shine bright like glowing hula-hoops wrapped round and round the small orb. But, my favorite view was the stars; clusters of starshine in clouds that lit up like huge swarms of fireflies in the warm summer evening, twinkling and flying in some harmonious pattern."

I can send you more if you want. The essay is a lot of stories growing up that connect with stars in some way.

jumping on the the bandwagon

Here I am!