Remnants of the Burn (Flash fiction for the last day of October)

Tarnished silver drops falling from a mottled pewter sky were enough to keep the smoker under the awning. Faint vapor swirls up from a cup of late afternoon coffee. The acridness of the smoke could near be felt through the glass. It wafted along with a muffled phone conversation seeping through the speckled panes. His waving hands swept in ragged circles, a cigarette in one tracing swirls through the air. Ashes drift from the tip to stipple the mahogany-sheened surface of his coffee. Distracted, he raises the cup and gulps down a mouthful. There was no time to warn him. Undeterred by ashes the conversation carries on. Inside, behind the glass, it is left to the imagination to wrap itself around the taste. As for myself, dark roast kissed by sugar lies content on the tongue.

Home Again, Home Again

The first thing that struck me was the aroma. The combined fragrances of the old house were the triggers that unleashed a flood of memory. The dam broke around ten years of time gone and memories burnished. Ten years since I walked through the door on the first day of ownership, seven years since I left it to embark on a quixotic quest for a happiness that was never quite attained. Time folded in on itself. Dizziness overtook me. To exist in the Then and the Now is a peculiar experience. I stepped fully through the door. The aroma intensified. Lightheaded, misty-eyed, I was home again.

Overturning the Bushel

Lux. Corpus lux! A folly of a translation, in service to the idea of we are but bodies of light. Or is it homines lumine, humans of light? Our bodies become an amalgam of stardust and intentions. Language itself becomes light. The gravity of Latin is ancient, its pull irresistible in the search for essence. These words! How far back must we travel to grip the soul of light? The gap between the experience of light and its description may never be closed. Words weep under duress of inadequacy, but they must make do. I can only blink my eyes and gape in wonder when it fills the around me, the sky above me, the heart within me.

Light all around. What was it like before humankind learned to paint it as it is known to modern man? Before electric light? As a teenager I camped one night under an unsullied canopy of stars. It was was enough to still my voice. My head filled with awe, dumbstruck by this highway of diamonds I never knew existed. A faint film of jealousy occluded my heart to know that long ago humans had experience of light never tainted by clever inventions. Jealousy because I wanted to know that, too. Such desire awakens to know these disappearing night skies because the universe turns fittingly. It is not due to artificial impositions of creatures who do not fully understand what they do.

Light reflected by water into sky. I laugh to myself. My fellow patrons in the coffee shop where I write don't notice my humor, or are polite enough to not stare. Do they know I dream here in the window? While I cannot see the water nearby, directly, it is visible in tiny slices if one looks carefully through the windows of the market cross the street. Some days there is no certainty if what can be seen is real, or just a figment. My mirth arises because I take comfort from the water in reality and in imagination. Water presents the light in an ever-changing familiarity of mien that we have never seen before but will always recognize.

Light. Where is this light we seek? How does it find us as it leaks through the slats, shines in the spaces between the leaves, illuminates our skin as we stand gaping under a sky so blue it makes the heart swell? This light, lovelies. This light that arrives and vanishes without warning. It fills the dreams and wakes us from the same, only to leave us confused and bereft but with comfort and hope. It will be back. Our light is fickle as we constantly hide it from ourselves. The soul can be a basket or a candlestick. To know in our lives the difference is a universal struggle. We are our own bushels, struggling to be overturned, that we may bring about the sharing of light.

Gossamer Threads of Cast Iron

A book, a skillet, and a hungry belly were the elements of a personal chemistry uniting in an emotional solution inside my head, the wondrous precipitate of which was to realize the sheer quantity of history held in my possession. The cornbread was fresh out of the oven. Black cast iron skillet gripped in one mitt-clad hand, wire rack held in the other, I flipped the bread over and on to the rack. Perfect. Balance had been achieved and honored. The unctuous sheen of glossy black metal unmarred by stuck bits of cornmeal testified to things right and proper, transfixing me on the spot in the kitchen. Something deep, something ancestral spoke.

Dinnertime had come around as it usually did. It beckoned to me to put down the book* I was reading and head into the kitchen. Hunger took precedence over a fascinating look at food and the people who raise and harvest it in modern-day Appalachia. The "mountain south" was not exactly on my mind as I puttered about, assembling good eats via practice, sense memory, and prized artifacts of the kitchen. Yet its presence hovered about. It wore like a light mantle spread across my shoulders, full of comfort and guidance. The touch was in charge of my hands, though that was in no guise very clear. My back brain was working on it all the while.

I did not grow up in the mountains of Appalachia. But my mama's mama (G-maw) and her people did. G-maw was born in West Virginia, close to western Maryland. She was of the mountains, of a holler. Her extended family, as well as my maternal grandfather, had deep roots clustered in West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. G-maw was a teenager when the Great Depression hit. That in combination with mountain life could not have been easy. It certainly was educational in that it taught her survival skills and granted a kind of wisdom that serves one well in life when making the best of what you have in hand. G-maw carried that experience to her new home in southeastern Virginia where she took up with my grandfather and began to raise a family.

Some of this was on my mind as I read that book. The language used and the descriptions of places, people, and food occasionally jolted me with the shock of the familiar. I recalled mountain topography from the occasional visits in my youth to relatives in West Virginia. The hollers, the switchback roads, the great green womb of trees hunkering by the roadside. Summer evening in a place not awash in light pollution or noise. The notion of snacking on saltines adorned with thick slices of bologna. That last one jumped from the book's pages to gob smack me, as I recognized it right away. As a youth, I ate more than my share. As an adult, the habit faded into memory. What the book did was to bring it back in full force. G-maw used to eat that stuff, and so did my family. I learned it as a tradition even though it was not taught as such.

Growing up in southeastern Virginia near the ocean is literally hundreds of miles from the mountains. Figuratively speaking, the soils of each were (and still are) two homesteads looking at one another over a river of time. With the exception of college (five years in the Blue Ridge Mountains) and a stint in the Midwest (five years near Kansas City, Missouri) all of my life has been spent in easy driving distance of the coast. My rhythms of life, speech, and eating habits all suffused with the coastal South, even when I tried for many years to downplay or hide my roots. I did not know as a young adult that to practice that sort of self-deception plants the seeds of anxiety and doubt. Seeds that will bloom later. Yes, they will. They catch up to you.

That time was a constant search. A longing I could not explain or fulfill no matter how many questions I asked. On the one hand I was pursuing the American dream mandate of job-marriage-2.5 kids-and a minivan. On the other I was losing sight of where I came from, and by extension, where I wanted to be. Eventually I was at loggerheads with myself. I lacked the insight to find the peace of mind or sense of ease in my own skin that I so desperately wanted. Anxiety, emotional numbness, and a serious digestion related health problem forced me into a corner. My search for escape routes led me smack into the middle of food, eating, and truly learning how to cook. And not just cook for survival, but to cook for some peace of mind.

G-maw passed away while I was a college student. Some years later I received the gift of some cast iron skillets that had belonged to her. I knew little about cooking well then so I had no idea of the magnitude of this gift. Those skillets followed me to my first apartment out of college, my first new house, an apartment and a house as a divorced bachelor, through changes in relationships and geography, to ultimately reside in the kitchen of my apartment not far from the Chesapeake Bay. In all those years, I learned a few things. including respect for that cast iron. The skillets were faithful and true, devoted as dogs tend to be towards those who love them. They helped keep me alive.

They spoke to me, those skillets. For years I did not understand what they were telling me because I balked at giving credence to spirits. To my mind that would have been akin to surrendering to the demons of depression, self-loathing, and melancholy that periodically seized hold of my imagination. The difference lay in the tone and quality of the voices competing for attention. What the skillets were imparting was delivered at a steady, quiet pace. Respectful and attentive, never overbearing or toxic. It was the voice of history, of my family guiding me along a path I was not fully aware of taking.

This is where cornbread stepped back in that evening just last week. I was making it in the very skillet my grandmother had used to make fried fish and hushpuppies for me and her, when I was a kid, washed down with iced tea spiked with lemon. My recent reading in that book about mountain food and people pushed to the fore memories of my time with G-maw. A lush scent of crackling crust and toasted corn filled my kitchen to trigger a thunderclap realization of my ancestry. 

I am more a child of the lowland and the sea than I am of the timberline and the holler, this is true. But the mountains are in my blood, evidenced by DNA and ingrained habits as a human being. I make cornbread in that skillet because that is what my grandmother made in it. The action made sense to me like water makes sense to a fish: you can be surrounded by something that gives you life and be oblivious to it and its inherent sacredness. You know it by its absence. To come back to it is to know comfort and connection. In the instant I flipped that cornbread out of the skillet I dove back into that matrix. I felt my grandmother's hands on mine, saw her smile from somewhere up in mountains much closer than I imagined. I was home, knowing that my heart beats in two places connected by gossamer threads of humble cast iron, well-seasoned by history and love.

---

*Victuals, by Ronni Lundy

The Loop

Funny old world it is, the ouroboros of my experience coiling around to swallow its tail. Unusually warm first day of fall and I'm heading home with a head full of memories. The second major phase of my life began in this town. Looks like the fourth major phase will start here too. Or is it the end of the third?

A little closer. I was in limbo. Is this now Hell? In the short time back I have driven many times past the church where I was married. The church is still there. The marriage collapsed long ago. Seeing the steeple puts a knot behind my breastbone. I swallow hard and push that memory back down into the cabinets in my head.

I keep driving. Cruising down some streets I used to know. A landscape of new daylight overlaid on old memories. Not much seems changed, with the exception of a massive superblock development that arose on the dilapidated bones of a shopping plaza that had seen better days long before I first laid eyes on it nearly three decades ago. Shiny new chain restaurants and some big box stores squatting on the land. An improvement one could say, if one were so inclined. I’m no fan of corporate soullessness, myself, but in this case it is better than the nothing of before.

It is better by the water. The rivers are different but still themselves. I can see the Chesapeake Bay most days, and a good walk serenaded by seabirds and wavelets is a privilege easy to enjoy. Maritime air is all around. Humidity is too. But I know the tides again. I hear my heart in the lapping of the waves. It is at ease with the water song and thrum of the ocean over the horizon.

The loop is closing. Its arc born in the slow-motion collapse of a life experiment out on the edge of the prairie. Seeds planted but could not hold purchase in a sea of grass. The arc burned its way up and out, finally sensing direction in the chaos, hope in the form of earlier sunrises in salt-tinged air. The path out resolved itself through a lens of tears and fortunate timing.

By such lights I found myself back in the town where I started my life after college. A hard landing brought the shell of me, with its withered heart and fragile bones, back closer in time and space to places the soul never forgot and people it never stopped loving. The prairie fire now just a smudge on the horizon pushed back by the wind of rebirth, with an ocean of truth and salt water stretching out in front of my fourth new life.

The tide flows through veins and heart. Currents of emotion borne on the waves I adore fill me with energy and push back the great gray walls that had threatened encirclement. The arc has bent towards itself. The ends are in view. The loop is closing before the eyes of my soul. Soon the circuit will be complete, and I will be electric in my erstwhile cottage by the sea.