Tuesday July 16, 6:08 a.m.
As if three score and ten were not enough, along comes
another. I’m not too good with math, but even I can figure out the cap on how
many are potentially left to go. Ah, but they are as inevitable as the Bleeding
Hearts just outside my office window, just starting to blossom out, and as
certain as the hummingbirds that will soon follow to thrust their long bills
into the tiny red folds, sipping nectar, wings aflutter.
Birthdays.
This one will be one of the most unusual I’ve ever had. In
about an hour I’ll leave to drive to Tuscaloosa to visit my oldest sister, Ann,
88, in the hospital. Now just by my saying 88 you will presume she has
difficulty walking around (and she has slowed) and that someone is usually
pretty close by in case she needs help. Not if she can help it! Yesterday she
decided she would go out to her flower garden and loosen up the soil with a hoe
and then push some of the dirt around the base of the hostas she started from
one rooted from my house in Prattville in the 80s. I’ve seen her do it a
hundred times, so I can see the scene. This part was new: she felt the bite
before she saw the head of the Copperhead dart back after his strike.
We only have two other poisonous snakes in Alabama—the
rattlesnake and the cottonmouth, if you don’t count the more southern coral
snake. Frankly, I’ve never seen a coral snake and I’m not certain I could
remember the jingle in time if I did. Red
on black, friend of Jack; red on yellow, kill a fellow.
Ellie Bryant inspired the first line of my snaky story “Envenomation”
in the Lectorium at Spalding with her comment: “I’m an e-mail slut.” So my
first line of this story became “My daddy handles snakes, and my mama is an
e-mail slut.” But, you know, now that I’ve remembered this incident, my story
begins in humor and ends in tragedy. I remember Lovie and the demise of her
Radio. I don’t like the ending of that story this morning. Lovie fares somewhat
better because she still has Silas—named after Silas House, the good preacher
from the snake-handling church. Still...
My brother-in-law, a doctor, and my consultant on snakebites
for the story, assured me last night that a copperhead bite is less dangerous
than a rattlesnake bite. He also said that the antivenin has improved some and is
not so apt to trigger an allergic reaction now that they use sheep instead of
horses—oh, but not to get into that process. It was good, he said, that they
were observing her overnight at the hospital.
As unlikely as this snakebite strike was the gift I found on
my kitchen counter this morning, a typed sheet of paper. You read that
correctly, typed as in typed on the
Smith Corona typewriter, borrowed from this same brother-in-law whose dad gave
it him to use in college. This typewriter has been sitting at the end of my
kitchen table for a week as my grandson Nicholas has typed on thick paper for
an art installation. This is his
“creative summer” following his freshman year at Syracuse University in
architecture. He hopes to have a complete art show before his return to
Syracuse in late August. That familiar sound of striking keys against paper has
lulled us to sleep nightly. It calls up my eleventh grade typing class at
Montgomery High, and a more recent memory, Jessica pounding out stories on
“Murder She Wrote” when our children were young.
My birthday poem.
I read it three times through before crying. Nicholas has
been the inspiration for many of my poems, and is the subject of the title poem
of my full-length collection. The realization hit home that in poems it is okay
to just lay bare our hearts. It is the only place we can do that without seeing
our words grow fuzzy and too precious.
He has given me a sweeping overview of the installation-in-progress.
It is filled with all the darkness teenagers experience in relationships in a
divorce situation, situations that even the adults involved can’t fully
understand. He has typed nearly a hundred pages of words this week spilled from
the gut and recorded in his notebook over the past year. He is still toying
with an arrangement of these words. Always eager to help with ideas, I’ve
pointed out to him the light and dark in Bruegel’s print that hangs in my
powder room, “The Fight between Carnival and Lent.”
This newest poem, a glorious song beaming from my
refrigerator, may be the start of balance for arranging his installation, adding
that warm, sunny side of healing.