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By Savannah Haze Date: 2002 Dec 27 Comment on this Work [[2002.12.27.00.15.18089]] |
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The swing creaks ever so slightly under Papaw's weight. His eyes are tired but lack no fire. Mama sips sweet tea with Aunt Nelly and Nani. Their scents mingle with the heavy Southern night. The oak, the elm, the willow. Witnessing to the early blossoming of summer love but never telling. Your arms are strong and dark from days in the field with your father. Wheat hair and tobacco eyes. Crooked bottom teeth. I am thirteen. My lavender sundress falls to one side, exposing my shoulder. It is freckled, kissed by the sun. The creek is cold on my feet. The comfort of familiarity; the awkwardness of the moment. I ache for that simplicity, for the moments before my life became a blur of deadlines and letdowns. When one kiss meant a whole summer of long walks and holding hands. Years were spent, journals filled with dreams of escaping, of being someone. Of leaving my home. And now, I want to be a girl again. I want a summer of square dances and midnight swims. I want to sleep with my window open. I want the cicadas to serenade me. I want to awake to bacon frying and biscuits baking. I want to chase boys and climb trees and be free of the rules of the world. Never realizing that I was someone. I was a girl who could two step for hours. I could swim the length of the creek underwater. I could spit a watermelon seed further than any boy. I could pick peas, shuck corn, and make a mean pan of cornbread. I was the star of my own show. In my little world. I wish I could go there again. But Papaw's eyes have grown dim and he doesn't always know me. Nani rocks her days away, missing the son she expected to outlive. The house, the farm, they are no longer mine to explore. They are no longer my refuge. Those boys I chased all grew up and scorned their fathers' simple ways. They became lawyers and stock brokers and doctors. And I... ...I have loved and lost and laughed and cried. I have been a Saint and I have been a shame. I have grown up... ...or so that is what they call it. I'm the woman who only dances when no one is looking. I'm the woman who is too ashamed to don a bathing suit. I'm the woman who eats watermelon with a fork. I buy my vegetables and watch my cholesterol. I am a dim star in a great big sky here in this busy, lifeless city. And I want to go home. |