While It Happens

Note to the reader: This text is a CENTO form of poetry. The lines in italics are a poem that can be read by itself. Woven inside my narrative, it becomes something else, assisting in the theme and message. 

I see her in a ring of sewing, light fingers on needle and hoop, elaborate scissors shaped like a tiny sotrk, the glass egg in her lap. Her temperate mourning wore black shoes (Adcock, lines 1-5)

The light does weird things in my memory. The room was dark contrast to the open window with the sheer curtains blowing in the wind. Like the fabric was some kind of daytime moonbeam that pierced the shadows of Granny's bedroom. I'd asked how she did her hair. She led me to her bedroom - I'd never been in that room before. She sat perpendicular to the window at her dressing table. I wasn't tall enough to see over her shoulder and into the mirror. Granny, my mom's grandmother, said I could take her hair down to see how it was done.  

Released, her hair released a scent as I imagined of ascending birds, or smoke from a burning without source, but cool as a mist over a real country, altars in the hills. That gray reached all the way to the floor (Adcock, lines 6-10). 

Her hands in her lap, she stilled while my fingers probed for the black hairpins folded into the grey and white strands. The coiled hair loosened, unfolding onto her shoulders. After brushing it out, I learned to twist it back into a calico snake of smoke and ash. 

A cloak, wind in a cloak, her hair in my hands crackled and flew. I dreamed her young and flying from some tallest room before she had to let her power down for something to take hold and climb (Adcock, lines 11-15). 

Loop it around itself with a twist and upward pull. Granny held it in place while I tried the bobbypins, securing the neat twist with clumsy approximation. That's all I really remember: us in a pool of sunlight in the dark, me learning how things were done. 

Permanence. Rose and vine were twisted hard in silver on the brush and mirror. Above us, the accurate clock pinged: always on a time there comes a sleep stony as a tower, with the world beneath (Adcock, lines 16-20). 

Today, the plumbers came to unclog the toilet. It's been four days. Sister finally convinced Dad that the home warranty place just wasn't going to respond and the fermenting toilet could wait no longer. Mom and Emma were playing SkipBo when the two burly men carried the whole toilet through the living room to chisel out the crust with a power washer. So much laughter. I arrived to clean up the floor and walls after it was reinstalled. 

and wound like this with locked bloom tarnishing - I brushed. She sewed or dozed. The child I was stood shoulder-deep in dying, in a dress of falling silver smoothed by silver, a forgetfulness dimming the trees outside the window like a rain (Adcock, lines 21-25). 

Thankful, she reminisced about teaching me to clean things like the toilets. I remember. On our hands and knees, she'd start at the top on the left; and to the right, I'd follow her motions from the top to the bottom, the back to the front, and then the floor. We'd rinse with hot water from the galvanized bucket of clean water and repeat the steps, this time, me leading and her following. 

She remembered that grandma never really taught her to do anything - just expected you to figure it out. Dad felt like the purpose was to make sure mom could think for herself. Unsure of that purpose, mom told about how she learned about toothbrushes. 

Mom overheard her Daddy asking if she ever brushed her teeth, mumbling something about breath. Grandma, impatient: "Well, she has a toothbrush." And mom thought, "I didn't know it was mine." So mom went about learning to brush her teeth. 

To grow to stay, to braid and bend from one high window - I guess the story I would learn by heart: how women's hands among sharp instruments learn sleep, the frieze like metal darkening, the land sown deep with salt (Adcock, lines 26-30). 

I remembered that moment - when Granny said that I could play with her hair to see how it was done. She didn't say anything. Didn't really give steps or advice. She just...let me touch her hair. Perhaps that contentment and presence didn't come through to my grandmother, mom's mom. But that line of independence and confidence in intellect and problem solving remained, even if implied. 

Like the toilet, the morphine, the home warranty company, the broken arms, the Parkinson's...Laughing, Telling stories, and adding another anecdote to the family lore, we figure it out together - while it happens.

Italic lines are from "Remembering Brushing My Grandmother's Hair" in the Desserts section of Poetry after Lunch, compiled by Joyce Armstrong Carroll and Edward E. Wilson.