The Blue Train Case

I grew up in California.  My first home, a travel trailer parked on the shore of Long Beach. Later a dilapidated rental in Orcutt, and then years after we moved to a three bedroom pink stucco on Edgewood in Santa Maria.  
My father a concrete foreman was constructing missile bases on Vandenberg.  In the summertime, my parents took us to both Carolinas.  But we largely went to visit my mother's parents, the octogenarians.  
It wasn't that my grandparents needed caretakers.  I think it was more my mother needed her community.

Mother was blessed with good genes and a large, healthy family.  One of her paternal aunts, Essie, lived to 106.  When Essie was, oh, a hundred or so, my mother took me to visit this aunt.  Arriving on the street where Essie lived, we pulled into her drive.  Essie unbent her ancient frame from pulling weeds in a garden, wiped her hands on her long apron, and waved, welcoming us to her home.

In the early nineties, newly divorced, and which brought great shame upon my folks, I moved from my comfortable home to a small trailer that I'd bought and placed into the yard next to my mother's country home.  Mother needed help with Daddy.  Although I had children, and I had been a faithful wife, I was now the single one in my family and had been taught that marriage was intended for life.  Therefore, when Daddy's cancer was clearly not going to go away, someone had to help mother.  And, well, we were a family that by example, took care of our own.  My siblings and their families provided constant help to our mother.  No one had to ask me, "Will you go help, also?"

Since this post is not about my father's journey with cancer, or the next five years of a daughter's care-taking, I'll push past to my witness of what happened in the aftermath and Dad's gift, post death, to my mother and by association, his final gift to me.  
The evening of my father's passing, a gentleman from the mortuary in town visited my mother's home.  This visitor spoke with us and brought to us written instructions my father had dictated. In other words, my father had prepared in great detail how his earthly life would close.  He had loved and maintained my gentle mother well for more than forty years; in death he would no less. To be brief here, all plans were made and visible.  Due to my father's attentive foresight, we now had a sense of direction. The next steps were taken with minimal effort.

After this caller's visit bearing my father's directions, my mother was left to simply don her silk black dress in preparation for a funeral...his funeral.  She next retreated inwardly for years to the grief in her own mind and as my father knew she surely would need to do.  Before he passed, Daddy reminded us to treat her with respect and to allow her to make changes at her own pace.  I soon moved again, this time to a cottage in town.

Four years passed, and as a result of a car accident, my mother's tragic and untimely death felled me to my knees.  Named her executor, my time to serve had come once again.  When I was strong enough to stand, I knew the first steps.

Mother had prepared me well. She had told me more than once, "I'm a McEntire. I'll probably live to be a hundred, but Teri, if I don't, look in my blue train case."

I knew this luggage as it was the only set I had ever seen Mother use.  A set she had lovingly maintained since early in her marriage to my father.  Her packing was meticulous, and when she carried her "good luggage, she did so proudly and with memories in tow. 

Mother stored her train case on a high shelf in a narrow hall closet.  I removed it from its place one afternoon late May a few hours after her passing and relocated to her tidy kitchen.

It was there upon a familiar childhood table and among the contents of an old blue train case that I drifted though my mother's mind, back in time and through the layers of her life.  In her train case, my mother had grouped items for my viewing. Some of these included: (1) Read this first. (2) You'll enjoy these. (3) This needs to be done. (4) I'd like for this to happen... (5) Cards I've loved. (6) For Teri, my tumbleweed. (7) You know you'll have to...  

Mother had tied each packet with a small white, and ribbon, and in her neat and beautiful script, she'd left notes, anecdotes, instructions, and musings for my review.  Sitting there, I imagined her hands as she had written and wrapped these items.  Not only was my mother a stunning beauty, she was willowy.  Her hands were tender, her finger long.  No one touched like she.

I studied the fine script of her notes.  Her touch came across my face.  She stroked my arms.  I read her menagerie in gentle peace.  Some of her notes were detailed to the umpteenth.  Some were direct, some her silly-funny, some gentle, some sad, and some introspective.  Some were secrets.

As I sat there drinking tea, celebrating my mother's life, and looking deeper into a soul that I realized I had only known in segments, I had the impression that a gentleman with instructions on how to proceed had just entered into the room.  Through the contents of a blue train case, a map had been provided.  I could don my simple frock.

Published by T. A. Price
2009, Open Salon (Scupper)

The Fruitcake Memory

The Fruitcake Memory

The year was 1994 and each evening in fall just as he had for thirty-six years of my life, my father, Randolph, began to crack walnuts, pecans, and Brazil nuts as he watched in sequence evening news and re-run westerns on the television.  Throughout my childhood, a round wooden nut bowl centered with metal picks was placed near his recliner, and each year in autumn I listened for the familiar sounds of breaking shells.  

At night, between the intermittent disruptions from my mother as she worked about the home (wherein he might stop and pull her into his lap as she walked by), his inaudible commentary rankled toward the news, and his laughter at the antics of a TV cowboy, my father after a long day's work forming concrete, patiently sat night after night cracking nuts, prying meats from inside shells, and periodically discarding the remains.  At day's end and sometime before his sleep, my father bagged these pieces and packed them into the household freezer.

When November came, large tin tubs, pounds of brown sugar, sacks of flour, refrigerated sticks of butter, bottles of Karo, and plastic cartons of green and red cherries began to claim the spaces and shelves of our small kitchen. Before the purchasing of a food processor, I was often assigned the jobs of organizing spaces, and chopping candied fruits. On mixing nights, my father’s large construction-firmed arms folded thick and lumpy batter into the rich, dark fruitcake mix that would soon be baked, soaked in brandy, and swaddled in cheesecloth.   I have learned since that fruitcake is one of those desserts that is either "loathed or loved."  For our family, fruitcake was pure love. Each December, after a night of robust sampling, we wrapped our loaves for distribution to a variety of friends and relatives across the Carolinas and beyond.

The recipe of making fruitcakes, at the direction of my mother, Fern, was an honored and symbolic part of the season for my parents, as were many of the other traditions they held so dear. My parents loved stringing the big, bold, brightly-colored red, blue, and green lights and refused to exchange them out when smaller, whiter, trendier lights became the preference of many. My mother asked for and chuckled each year as we found and cut the “Charlie Brown” tree and hauled it homeward from the pasture below our barn. She made popcorn and cranberry stringing a “job” for us all. She played endless Christmas albums on a large 1960’s stereo console that my father once brought home after a rousing, buddy-night game of cards in Santa Maria, California, and she wore a variety of red and green embroidered Christmas sweaters that I am sure have surfaced again in someone’s holiday tacky-sweater party.  She saved and treasured the ornaments children made, and these were the ornaments that adorned our tree, save a few blown glass bobs that today would be a collector’s joy.  In terms of charitable giving, both parents insisted that we all make and purchase gifts to share with those less fortunate. Providing good food, new clothing, and simple gifts to those in need was an expected rite of passage in our home.

When I asked my mother once about her devotion to these traditions, she shared that as children of the depression, both she and my father had experienced similar Christmas pasts. They shared a joy of fruitcakes, peppermint sugar-stick candies, oranges, and brown treat bags that the church distributed to attending guests. Along with Christmas carols and attending the annual church program, these traditions were the holiday delights of their childhoods.  Fondly, in my home, we experienced a passing down of sorts, and as a family all took part in the preparation of the cakes.

The year was 1994, and my father passed away in August after an eight-year battle with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.  That November, the house was dark and silent in the night, and the nut bowl sat empty by his chair. Come December, no music played, no tree was up.  

Today, I don’t recall much about that Christmas, except that we somehow all mangled through.  I told someone once that when my father passed, I felt as if the sandbags holding my life in place had drifted out to sea.  What I do recall about that season is that my Aunt Hazel Guffey, one of my mother’s elder sisters, arrived one chilly November night with a bag of pecans she had shelled from her Florida trees with a chiming message for my mom and for us all,  “It’s time to make your cakes, Fern, it’s time to make your cakes.”  And so, together, we did.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Teresa Price

2015

Before we settled in a row of tract, before we settled at all, we scrambled about from one concrete site to another in a small travel trailer.  This particular travel trailer replaced a former that was destroyed in an Idaho storm when I was but four months old.

The story I heard my mother tell was that the trailer began to sway while Rander drove.  Somehow she had the wherewithal to run and grab her babe.  My brother, five years older, was riding in the cabin with my father.  In my mother's version, she had no sooner lifted me from where I lay sleeping when a television soared off the stand and crashed  upon my fresh imprint.  This near death fiasco so close to the fact that my mere conception was post a late season miscarriage, led my mother to believe in the intention of my birth.

For about a year, we lived in a pitted lot overlooking a stretch of beach near Lompoc.  In the pictures I have of my mother she is soft glamour amidst dilapidation.  She in her skirts and cotton blouses.  My brother soon made friends with the hoboes who ate better for at least a year due to my mother's generous offerings.  Apparently the relationship was allowed to continue until  he incorporated and slipped a string of colorful phrases  into our compact home .

(L-R children on the beach - Randy, Teresa, Fern), Long Beach, California, 1959

My father's work hours began early and ended late, but on the weekends he was free and on reserve.  Each Saturday, these Saturdays long before lawn clippings and cans and beef barbecue, he removed the dust and grit and damned-ness of his week and pulled slick waders in their place.  I often sat and watched him fish.  He knee deep in the surf, me buried in the sand, my brother God knows where, my mother boiling coffee.

I composed verses there on the shore.  I did not know it yet that I was writing.  Only that the ocean blue carried me too, adrift and beyond.  I sang for captains in the offing.  I was just a girl contented in her own head, with a brother at play, a mother who called me the minstrel, and a father bringing fish for dinner.  Years later, I began to write everything down.  Boxes have since trailed my life, boxes filled with letters and hoarded scrap.  Still, I'd love to know the words now lost to Euclidean, the words waves once washed from a tender line and carried on divided cleft to some imperceptible space.

Teresa Price © 2010
rev/2016

Tryon Soap: Buy Locally at Tryon Mountain Hardware

Tryon Soap can now be purchased locally at the SoPoetry Soap Shop, 341 South Main St., Rutherfordton, NC.  The shop is open on Mondays and Fridays 1-4 PM and also on Saturdays from 10 AM to 6 PM

You are invited to visit the SoPoetry cottage soap shop soon to browse the Tryon Soap selections.  Tryon Soap is the SoPoetry brand of soap specializing in small batch soap making with creamery goat milk and with coconut milk.  The soaps  come in a variety of scents and textures from mild to scrubby like a loofah!  Simply good soap, naturally!

Let SoPoetry soap shop provide you with your soap needs for a pure and natural soap experience.  Natural...Indulgent....Pretty!

SoPoetry is owned by the owner of this blog, poet T A Price.

Open Salon (In Memoriam Event)

JULY 19, 2011 10:35AM

On looking out

RATE: 20

looking up                   on the Slot Canyon Trail at Tent Rocks National Monument*

ON LOOKING OUT

It feels like this.

First, there is the below,

which knows no bottom.

The base is dark and full of secrets.

Somehow, you know,

that once,

someone found this depth.

But you know not the who,

nor do you doubt,

your inert, recalling trace

of field. 

If somehow you get to the level of air,

you feel the weight,

the fullness,

the vast intention

and dispersal of gravity

in a life displaced

and captured, 

across your face,

across your eyes,

across your mind, 

just before the narrowing

where interchange exists

in and beyond the peer. 

O, but to the blue

and past the looking out

where veils grace

a third day's delight,

where breath and song

are lifted,

where words live and 

shutters pulse 

inversely square and centered, 

proportioned and concentric, 

to connect and present

within the line of sight.

© 2011 by Scupper · all rights reserved

*Photo © 2011 by Barry B. Doyle · all rights reserved and used with permission

from comments:

(As an aside, and forgive me for saying, that I'm very happy that because of the exquisite and consistent quality of your art, that you are the only person that I have granted free use of my images past and future at your own discretion.)

bbd

JULY 21, 2011 11:54 AM

I appreciate the many comments here. And Barry, you have shared quite an unexpected gift, and I am both humbled and thankful. I'm often lost in your photography. I so hoped this would meet with your expectations. I've tossed it and tossed it, and still see possible turns here and there. Thank you!

scupper

On Passion

On Passion

Mama used to sit and sew long into the night.

My room was near the corner in the hall

where her Singer sat.

I’d hear busy feet tap a pedal.

I’d hear a whizzzzzz and steady throb of needle,

I’d hear nimble fingers turning edge and thread.

And every now and then,

I’d hear Mama murmur something like, “Yes, Fern” 

as she talked herself through a patch.

Mama was a perfectionist with stitch.

Thread in.

Thread out.

The lines had to track a perfect trail.

No strings lost track.

No garment shrugged.

The sleekest silks draped straight.

Mama loved to dress.

She’d fuss and bother over every fit.

Sometimes she'd take a trip to town

to eye a window's special.

Come Sunday morning

she'd have the look cut and sewn

and showcased 

upon her tiny frame.

Unlike Mama,

I never took to handiwork,

or to the layers of fabrics filling

closets in our home.

But I understood.

My slip was to be lost in some similar nook.

The same I felt with book and light

while under cover

or on a limb, or in a loft,

or with a pen and writing

while sprawled across the floor.

The hours were never long enough,

the moments though extended,

even spread across a night.

© T A Price 2014

(Singer photo wikimedia commons)

Intrinsic

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

~ T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 
Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917

 

                                           INTRINSIC

The light and goodness
do not sustain
before I find myself
seeking the dim night
the dim fade
the dim close
the dim murder
of the day.

If I were an artist,
I’d choose the river gumbo
mined for my display.
Mud marbles.
Mud ornaments.
Mud dried
quick cracked.
Black tar thick
upon my hands
’til fired and hollowed
core on muralled walls.

If I were a throaty note,
I’d be one final
lingering draw,
the oak and smoke
remnant bit
of Booker charcoal
in the bottom
of some
mahogany glass.

If I were your eyes,
I’d be the cataracts
removed after
robbing your sight,
your strength,
your resolve to fight,
to draw,
to live,
to sing,
to love,
to survive.
To even drink
again with gusto,
but without the loss
of love, of fame,
of a good woman’s shame.
That would be I.
One craggy pair of claws
claiming green irides
for what will never be,
but for I alone
in the dark,
in the deep
in the blue
of the
blackest sea.

Published:  (1) Open Salon (Scupper poems)

(2) Fictionique, 2012: http://fictionique.com/?p=17471