Family

Great-great-granddad

My great-great-grandfather, by all accounts, didn’t put much stock in photographs.  Too new, too strange.  It was almost indecent, making pictures of people like that.  He’d heard that kings and princes and such had painters to come and make pictures of them, but that was painting, that was different.  It took a while… several days, by his reckoning… and, well, that was for kings.  Like wearing those bright-colored tights — fine for fine folk, but not for him.  These photographs, somehow, were worse.  Too quick.  They didn’t take so long to make, and so people were going around wasting them on regular folks.  That just couldn’t be right, could it?

He didn’t hold with fairs and festivals and the like, either.  Too much like carnival.  Oh, yes, he’d heard stories about carnival.  A visiting preacher had spoken one Sunday morning about the immoral ways of the old country and how every year they had revelry so scandalous that it took forty days to atone for it afterward. (more…)

Memory seed.

My parents’ woods.  Shade, creek, flowers, vines, fences.  These have always been there in my memories.  In the right season, we would go and look for the pink lady’s slipper orchid; at other times, we would simply walk for the sake of walking.  Fifty acres, mostly wooded, spread out beneath our feet, filled with jack-in-the-pulpit, trillium, honeysuckle, and a wealth of other wildflowers.

On one occasion, I remember a man going with us who did not normally go.  I think he was my uncle.  I know that I was too young to know why he was there, since he did not live with us.

The walk was… how long?  I’m not sure, because I’ve forgotten most of it.  The only fragment of that day that has survived was near the end of the hike.  We were walking uphill, approaching the back of my father’s barn.  My uncle was in front of me.  He and my father paused for a moment to talk, and as I squinted up at them against the patches of sun falling through the leaves, my uncle bent and scooped something from the ground.  He turned and extended his hand to me, smiling.  I took what he held and looked down at it, puzzled. (more…)

Harri Stojka

Guitars and needles, strings and yarn… the past
returns with chords of music, wool, and wood.
The strands of music weave their way around
his strands of hair. Its hue is like the back
of his guitar, its acorn-chestnut glow
like Grandma’s polished floor, her polished chair.
She knitted in that chair, and he knits tunes
like woolen sweaters in the air or gloves
for children’s fingers. Wrinkles line his face.
They sing of age and cold, as Grandma’s did.
Her chair had armrests polished smooth and dull,
as his chair’s arms must be. She hunched with age
and pain and concentration, as does he.
She would have liked this man, this song, these strands.

  (more…)

...still warm...

She made cookies.

There are times when cookies are necessary.  They are sugary little emotional painkillers, morphine for the soul.

Most people don’t realize it, but many words in the English language derive from ancient onomatopoeia.  There is a reason why “fuzzy” sounds, well, fuzzy, and why pronouncing “stutter” sounds like you have a bit of a speech impediment.  Likewise, there is a reason why “cookie” has that heartbeat BUHdum rhythm to it.  Cookie.  Cookie.  Cookie, cookie, cookie, pulse getting faster as you smell the chocolate… cookiecookiecookiecookie heralds a touch of brown sugar and cinnamon.

Cookies. (more…)