This is my Six-Sentence Thursday contribution to the GirlieOnTheEdge blog. Sometimes I use these tiny flash-fiction prompts to see how far I can condense a piece of writing without losing the meaning of the story.
This one is truly worthy of a howl. Fortunately, Harold did not blow the house down, although he displaced a small portion of the foundation.
We were starting high school and I was thrashing through cobwebs in my nerdy friend Harold’s basement so I could watch his latest experiment. He had me hunker down behind a bunch of dusty old boxes while he struck a match and lit a fuse hanging out of the foundation.
“What are you doing?” I howled.
“Ten,” he said.
“Come on, Harold, you’ve set your little experiment
under the sill plate of your own house.”
He finished his countdown, smoke poured out of the little
hole in the foundation, I ducked behind the boxes just before I heard an
explosion and a spattering of stuff, and Harold jumped up and yelled, “It
worked! It worked!”
We often think of culture as arts, but some cultural practices are so basic as to be essential to life. I haven’t used the prompt words “old world” from the Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog prompt in my text, but the meaning is there.
“It’s because we were midwives—from Scotland,” Grandma
said.
“What’s that got to do with a family that doesn’t touch
each other?”
“They didn’t want anybody slobbering over their
babies.”
“Slobbering!”
“Germs.”
“They didn’t know about germs back then.”
“The experts didn’t know.” She gave me one of her now-think-about-this looks. “Women who took care of mommas and babies didn’t have microscopes, but they knew that boiling water and washing everything within an inch of its life resulted in more live babies. The fewer people handling babies, the more they lived.” She gave me another look. “Generations of observation.”
This is Grandma Hazel. She was descended from Scots and German midwives.
I recently ran across John Steinbeck’s The Log From the Sea of Cortez. An article in the September issue
of Smithsonian pointed me in the
right direction and I’m glad it did.
Steinbeck marvels in the early part of the book on the boat
master’s ability to stay on course and writes at length about the organic
nature of steering on water. I’ve never spent much time on a boat, but I used
to fly and I think I understand something of the adaptation we humans must make
in alien environments. I believe it has to do with attention.
One of the tests a pilot must pass in order to received a
license requires recovering from a stall. Basically you make your craft start
falling out of the sky and then you recover from that fall—preferably before
you hit the ground.
I couldn’t do it. I could recover all right. I just couldn’t
make the plane stall. I’d pull the nose up until the plane was nearly vertical,
but the instant I heard the change in engine pitch and felt that soft kind of
flutter that signaled a stall, I dropped the nose and the stall never happened.
Over and over, the examiner instructed me to stall the plane, but I couldn’t.
So he stalled it for me. I recovered and got my license.
Some people would call that flying by the seat of my pants,
but it wasn’t. It was responding to subtle but concrete sensory cues. What I’m
getting at is that my awareness of the tiniest sounds and sensations made me
safe in the sky. Like steering a boat or flying a plane, we humans can learn a
great deal from attention to the sights and sounds, the smell and even the feel
of the air around us.
Our planet is under siege and we with it. We need to experience and understand the nuances of what’s around us. We know about the conflagration in the Amazon and the floods in low-lying areas all over the world, but we need to know about our own neighborhoods. Our very lives depend upon it.
Forget about roses. have you ever stopped, listening to bumblebees working on butterfly milkweed?
As I write prairie,
weather sometimes becomes a character with as much effect on human outcomes as
my imagined people. The GirlieOnTheEdge six-sentence blog challenge word this
week is atmosphere.
When he’s done yelling and
screaming, he trundles off to bed and I stalk the house.
I feel the atmospheric pressure
change; the screaming wind stills suddenly and I know what that means.
In the dark, I step outside to
watch seething clouds above the house, where they swarm and churn.
I wish myself part of them, lifted
out over the prairie, a swirling of atoms.
A spiral sorts itself out—a
little, black tongue drops and recedes, moving to the northeast, dropping again,
and I know someone not far away will lose something tonight.
In this house, for the first time, I’m allowing myself to recognize that it’s already lost.
What I didn’t realize when I shot this photo is that over the hill a little way, a tornado was upsetting a pivot irrigation system.
This week’s Carrot Ranch Challenge word is Sweet Jam. Boy does that bring back the country.
Today it’s wild plums. You step in the back door and the smell of sweet jam overwhelms your senses. On the stove, pulp boils with sugar. You hear thick, red bubbles spatter like hot lava.
Another bucket of fresh fruit rests on the floor. You pick
up a few. You rub them between your fingers. The frosty coating rubs off,
leaving shiny, bright skins—deep red, pink, and gold. A colander holds dry
husks of bitter skins for the compost.
Sparkling jars line the counter tops, waiting to seal the taste of summer for mid-winter
I’ve been thinking about
energy. The thing that brings it to the top of my mind is my heart—actually the
neurons that control my heartbeat.
I currently have a heart
monitor imbedded in my chest. Before it was implanted, the medical staff told me
it’s just this tiny little thing. They showed me the little metal device.
“We’ll just slip it under your skin . . .” Hardly prepped me for the
sledgehammer to the chest of the needle delivering anesthetic.
So here’s what I’ve been
thinking about: While this was tiny as surgery goes, it hurt. If the monitor
shows that I need a pacemaker (another tiny little device, they tell me, that required
a tiny little surgery) there’s the problem of battery replacement after THAT
surgery—and removal of the monitor.
I’ve been reading about
static electricity. Twice in the last few months, I’ve read that scientists
think they can develop pacemakers that recharge using the static electricity
created by the patient’s lungs—just by breathing. That’s what I want, but it’s
not yet on the market.
Industrial-scale devices to
power whole cities with static energy aren’t either, though I read in the
current issue of Discover Magazine
that several groups of scientists are working on them. I hope they’re
successful.
In the meantime, my health
and the world economy depend on research, economics, and a whole range of other
forces beyond my control. I’m daunted by the task of making those processes
more sustainable.
When I’m overwhelmed, I
often turn to other’s wise words. Wendell Berry is one of those wise speakers.
He’s not speaking specifically of energy when he says: “The dilemma of private
economic responsibility . . . is that we have allowed our suppliers to enlarge
our economic boundaries so far that we cannot be responsible for our effects on
the world. The only remedy for this that I see is to draw in our economic
boundaries. shorten our supply lines, so as to permit us to know literally
where we are economically.”And yet, everything we buy, everything we use,
exists within those far-flung economic systems—thereby enlarging my dilemma.
Not only am I ignorant of
the static-charged battery’s stage of development, I don’t know where and how
the actual pacemakers are made. What resources go into their manufacture? What
other materials and equipment go into their implantation? Are all those things
sustainable? Are there more sustainable alternatives?
I’ve seen unsustainable medical
devices that are just plain silly. When it comes to my health, can I identify
those devices and procedures and avoid them?
This is a six-sentence challenge story in response to the GirlieOnTheEdge blog. The prompt word is code and you should go see how others have met the challenge. In this context, to be coded is to be resuscitated when your heart stops.
She’s somebody’s grandmother and he visits every day. Mostly
she knows him, but sometimes she calls him by his grandfather’s name. He smiles
and shows me the pictures, side by side, one blond and one dark. “I don’t
mind,” he says. “We look just alike and she loves us both.
“I’ll miss her,” he
says, “but she doesn’t want to be coded—says there’s nobody left knows what she
knows. She attended all their funerals.”
On Tuesdays, I like to post my contribution to the week’s 99-word Carrot Ranch Literary Community. I like it especially because, although it’s not poetry, it encourages me to condense my narrative line. Perhaps those of you who write might want to try it here.
We used to have a row of mulberry trees on one side of our
driveway. In midsummer, when the skies shone cerulean and ships of clouds
sailed the prairie, the trees turned green and shiny as holly and began
producing the first sweet purple fruit.
My sister and I climbed those trees, but like Snow White’s sweet apple, they exacted a price. We’d climb out of the trees with scratches and rips on our bare legs and arms, even our faces, twigs in our tousled hair. Our purple mouths, fingers, and purple-stained playsuits testified to our willingness to pay.
I find that I don’t have a single mulberry tree in my photo archives and I can’t swear the linked image is a mulberry tree, but I see similar density.
The linked image shows what we were after–the only thing I can think of that’s better is blackberries and they don’t grow well here.
This is an early photo. Grandpa later closed in the porch and added a woven-wire fence.
This quote from Toni Morrison keeps dancing around in my
head this morning: “Water has a perfect memory and it is forever trying to
get back where it was. Writers are like that, remembering where we were . .
.”
The waters in my life run back to the home place, the place
I sold a couple of years ago. I still feel an acute sense of loss in its
absence—even as I’ve visited and found the new owners repairing and upgrading
what I couldn’t.
I understand why my sister was furious with me. All I have
to do is close my eyes and I’m back there decades ago. Daddy’s still alive. So are
Grandma and Mom. Jo Ann and I would ride our bikes up that devastatingly tall
hill, listening to wind humming in the fence wires. Heat would rise from the
hard-packed roadbed in waves you could sometimes see. We’d stand on the pedals,
inhaling a thin aroma of dust, probably using up all the calories we were about
to consume. We’d tramp, hot and sweaty, across Grandma’s entry porch into the
kitchen and open the ‘fridge off to the right inside the door. We’d make
sandwiches—two slices of white bread, a slice of bologna, a slice of American
cheese, a slice of tomato fresh from the garden, and maybe some cucumber
slices, all cemented together with Miracle Whip™. We’d never ask.
In the cool interior of that house, we found Grandma and our
Aunt Nina. They always seemed glad to see us—even when I stormed in the back
door and pounded on the piano before I even said hello. Grandma said she knew
then that I’d had a fight with my mother, so she let me pound it out. I find
myself doing the same when my one-year-old grandson has his kicking, screaming,
arm flapping melt-downs. (He’s usually mad at me.) I lay him on the floor where
he can’t hurt himself and let him sort himself out, it usually only takes a few
minutes.
I guess last summer’s wildfires, this spring’s floods, miscellaneous hurricanes and tornadoes, and finally mass shootings, not to mention the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, finally got to me. This one’s a dark response to a Six-Second Challenge posted by Denise on her GirlieOnTheEdge blog. The prompt this time is Fare.Maybe you’ll want to try something cheerier.
I’ve got my fare and just a trifle to spare,“ but this is no
Chattanooga Choo Choo? I’ve paid through the end of the line, across the
continent to the end of a world crunched off into the Pacific. I can barely see
through the filthy train window but it doesn’t matter; there’s nothing to see. I
didn’t even see them bury my family, didn’t know they were gone until two weeks
after the funeral—all done while machines breathed for me. Too slow, I tried to
cover them with my body. Now I have no home; no place to stop; nobody left; just
endless motion.
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