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

Luminescence

Luminescence

Your love whispered

a waft of breath.

Your light a shine

but not incendiary,

’til now.

Somehow, with 

a slow and easy grace

you carried oxygen

across and toward

and into me,

waiting.

Like the female firefly

who selects her mate

according to the power

of his flash,

for years I chose your words,

blinking, blinking, blinking

eventide

and held them 

in my heart aglow 

never burning touch,

’til now.

a Scupper poem

July 10, 2014

 © Teresa Price

Photo:  Creative Commons 3.0

The Summer of Pink

The Summer of Pink




The timeline is the 1960's, and I discover reading.

My family and I are packed tight into a sedan.  Our dog, Pudgy the red dachshund, is our mascot.  We are leaving the urban sprawl of tract housing in California for a summer's visit to the farmland of my mother's homeland in a hollow in North Carolina.


The trip before us is soon proving disastrously adventurous.  While traveling Route 66 in our pink Rambler, Pudgy gets into a food sack and eats a bunch of green grapes.  She is now grossly ill and is repeatedly sick in the car.  We keep stopping.  My father is snarling.  My mother is managing.  My brother, sister, and I are holding back our howls.

Somewhere in Arizona, we visit a regular tourist souvenir trap, and I buy an Indian doll.  My new treasure is soon packed safely inside a summer suitcase.  I have pen and paper, and I am writing about the trip.  I am also planning what I want to do when we finally stop in the south. The afternoon rolls along, and in my lap is a book I'd bought for ten cents at the end-of-school book sale, The Pink Motel, co-authored by Dorothy Erskine and Patrick Dennis.

From the first paragraph I am hooked.  Far away from the primers of Sally, Dick and Jane, suddenly a whole new world opens.  In this story, a mother unexpectedly inherits an island hotel that she does not want to run from an uncle she whom she has not seen in years.  The father, a scholarly sort, helps maneuver the family to the hotel in order to make practical decisions about the hotel's outcome.  The two perky children narrate the run of the place.  The first guest arrives, and the zany plot is set into full motion.  Each guest, a regular annual visitor, brings a new, vibrant, eclectic personality into the mix.  In the tale's middle are the children, roaming an island and acquainting themselves with the quirky summer inhabitants and solid-sense residents who live there year round. Soon, the plot becomes a whodunit mystery that I don't want to ever end.

My world soars.  Are there more stories like this?  Are there more good books?

Once in Carolina, we leap excitedly into the waiting arms of our elderly grandparents.  Hours in transit, we chuck our Converse traps, and our toes are immediately warm in the farm's red dirt.  We race free to the creek.  We saddle and ride our horses.  We eat okra and corn and tomatoes and beans.  We fish and string brim from the bank.  We visit lanky cousins with their funny, southern "ya'll come back before you leave" speech.  

My grandfather walks with me daily to a country store where I press my nose to a long glass case, and I study rows and rows of penny candy in jars.  I eat a chocolate marshmallow treat called Moon Pie, and drink a cold, citrusy Orange Crush from a dark brown bottle.  My grandmother, a former midwife of this country community, takes me to an outdoor tabernacle camp meeting.  She tells me my grandfather helped pull the timber for the building when they first arrived in the hollow. Cedar shavings blanket the floor.  I sit on a long, prickly wooden pew, and sing a song together with a hundred voices, the words  Amazing Grace.

In Shingle Hollow, an old bus book-mobile makes a weekly stop at the foot of my grandparent's rocky drive.  I browse the shelves, and stack my arms.  I'm stock full and ready for the weeks to come.

I retire each night from all the coming and going to the top floor of a fifty-year old clapboard farmhouse that still has no indoor bathroom.  A large galvanized tub on the back porch is filled  at dusk for the day's wash-up.   My ruddy, limber frame is bucket soaked and Ivory-soap scrubbed. In telling my grandmother goodnight, I use the expression newly learned by default, "I am full as a tick."  

Now in cotton pjs, I'm headed to the old feather bed in the attic where my mother must have surely slept as a girl.  A window fan orchestrates the katydids of night.  On the nightstand is a selection of books.  One, I've recently begun, Stormy, Misty's Foal.  I am eager to read and read and read.  In a few hours, my father will come to the door and instruct me to turn off the light.  He will return again in thirty minutes  to demand the flashlight I am hiding for spare under the covers.  My mind is free.

My reading ritual begins, night after night, as I become lost  within the lively community living among the pages of Carol Ryrie Brink's, The Pink Motel.  I'll get to the decisions of the Beebe family and Misty's lot later in the summer.  In this hour, it is the fix of the pink that will readjust and set my mind for the exploration of words I have finally found.


©Teresa A. Price, 2009