Mother would call me outside to inundate me with shampoo and buttermilk. Buttermilk still holds a violent retching power for me. The way it looks is bad, the smell is worse. I would smell curdled for days after she massaged that thick, soured muck into my hair. It was as if she were marking her territory.
The drumming of rain on the roof and its splatter in the trees is the only lullaby I've ever known. I can picture vividly the slant of rain and remember watching it soak the peeling red paint at the edge of the porch. A strong wind would blow and my sister and I would be hit full in the face with a sopping sheet of rain. We called this "camel spit" and it always led into the stormy jungle of a story.
I remember one about God's bathtub overflowing - His wife calls for Him to move furniture while He's running bath water and He forgets to turn it off when He goes to answer her summons. The overflow is rain. Thunder is Him stomping to the living room to do this chore He's done many times for a wife who likes to keep her Husband's life lively by re-organizing their home often. He drops the couch on His toe and His cursing creates lightning. (He has an ingrown toenail that's especially painful.) As a child, this sent me into gails of laughter. I smile, remembering how each new peal of thunder would set me off again.
The smell of wet dirt mixed with the rich, musty aroma of soggy floorboards has long been a perfume to my senses. Watching rain from a window just isn't the same for me. I miss the scent of revived earth. I can't hear the leaves shedding glossy diamonds onto one another. There is no cool breeze tickling my nose with feathery wisps of my hair or mist moistening my lips. I am left out of Nature's games as the clouds chase each other across the sky and cannot experience the lifting of my face to be baptized by drops of Heaven.
Love, laughter, and pure joy were found on that porch. I made new friends there and lost my oldest. I'm ten years older, and may live to be 50 more, but I'll never find such simplicity anywhere else. I wish I could wake up to the porch hours that were my childhood, if only to plant them more firmly in mind.
Now I sit here in a different home, six years older than when I originally wrote this and am thankful that I -have- found the porch hours again. Walking down the street in the pouring rain with no shoes and no umbrella while cars speed past me and I do nothing but adore the chill of my skin, the slick sidewalk under my feet, the skirt clinging around my legs. It's wonderful. I live for those moments... Walking home in the snow when it's gotten dark and the street lights uplight frozen trees making them an icey blue and purple that seems nebulous in the over-quiet of a snow-laden city. The particular green of the sun shining through the bamboo that shelters my balcony.
The most important thing I've learned in this half decade is that the porch hours are all around me, just waiting to happen. I know now that I can even -make- them happen if I want to. There's nothing like knowing your life is just like you wanted it to be, even if it was delivered in the wrong box and the label is written in your own hand.
(written sometime in 1995/6, revisted 2-8-02) |
