the last time

I wrote this in January of 2008 in response to a writing prompt: "When did you last stay up all night?" For some reason it resonated for me this evening as I ran across it accidentally in some old files.

It was last season, before all the leaves fell. I sat by a fire and renewed it when it diminished and read poems and wrote some things down in my notebook. I listened to the quiet. I held my old gray cat against my bare knee and rubbed his head. I thought about my grandmother and her painting and how she didn't start doing it till she was over fifty. I took some pictures of small things: a silver pendant, an old acorn I found under a tree in New England, the plumes of color coming off the burning wood in front of me. I didn't even try to sleep. I walked out onto the deck around 3 a.m. and the wind was blowing leaves down in big drifts. I made myself some popcorn and dusted some brewer's yeast onto it. I felt happy in my solitude though also a little lonely. I find that when my singularity is challenged I cling most intensely to these times. It’s good to stay up all night alone from time to time.

They sag in just the way I remember, clotting against each other in nests of purple and gold, skins thinning and flesh softening in cracks of sidewalk concrete.  As a child I used to eat them off a tree at the edge of a cotton field, loving them more than wild plums but not as much as blackberries. Their feral sweetness in my throat tickled with its hint of something gone to ruin, something almost too wild to be with. Only once I picked them before they’d ripened, the blister of their greenness sending me home for water in a hurry, my mouth full of trickery and insolence. Some years later I made some jam with them. It sat on my shelf in jars until someone insisted I spread it on toast, and I did. My teeth missed the skins and the nudge of the pit. Wasps still crawl inside their golden hearts, I notice now, intoxicated with loamy fruitflesh and the heady disappearing nourishment of summer.

©Laura Sorrells 2007--2012

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White Lily

Last week I was looking through old notebooks and ran across a 2008 journal entry written in response to a prompt about a food from my childhood. I had written about these little freezer rolls my Grandma Sorrells made, which were actually rather bland but took on the texture and flavor of whatever you ate them with in a really fine and singular way. I remember how butter and homemade fig preserves turned them into islands of sweetness and flake. I remember how my grandma rarely made biscuits, at least not that I recall. When I found out later in life how dangerously good a big old buttered cathead biscuit could be, I thought about the little rolls and how Grandma used to bake them by the dozen for us and for her best friend, an African-American woman named Claudia with whom she worked at the local primary school cafeteria. I wish I knew how to bake them myself. Possibly my father has the recipe. I will have to ask him.

Thinking about the little rolls got me to thinking too about White Lily flour. It’s the best flour you can bake with, the Southern foodways people I know assert. It’s supposed to yield fluffier cakes, more perfectly textured bread. Lighter biscuits?  Maybe. I’m not sure, though, that biscuits are meant to be light. I think of them as intense and substantive, dense and strong. If they were light, maybe they’d lose some of their heft and power. Maybe I just haven’t had the right biscuits yet. I don’t eat them much anymore. Hardly ever,  really.

At any rate, White Lily flour does have a luster and pearly softness that make it sweet to touch on tabletops, and other places, too. I’m not any sort of expert so I don’t know what makes it like that, what turns it into a sift of loose satin, like something a Vermeer model might choose to bake bread with. My grandma was an expert, though. Her reverence for the gentle softness of flour and the alchemy surrounding it makes me think now about cornmeal and its holiness, about the scatter of it around the dancing katsina spirits at Hopiland several summers ago. I think about the flung goldenness of it on a warm September wind at the Etowah Indian Mounds, and about my dear old friend John, who flung it, and who died last June at the age of 52.  Ceremonially, White Lily has a sacred quality to it that I surmise is borne of its capacity to bring sustenance, to make a meal, to build up blood and bone and brain and vision. It’s the raw stuff of spirit despite its tangible delicate softness. It becomes a tribute, maybe even a conduit, for those who use it to mark sacred time and honor ancestors. It brings things into an awareness of their commonality in a Body. I think about White Lily and wonder how odd it would seem if I headed out to the big old rural cemetery where my grandma is buried, north of Monroe, and dusted a fine skein of flour around the flat metal plate that marks her grave. I don’t think I’ll do that, but not because of the strangeness of the act or of what anyone might think about it. It just doesn’t feel like my grandma is there, beneath that grassy space with its dozens of unperturbable little memorial flags and lopsided flower arrangements made of plastic and cheap cloth. A better spot to put the flour would be around the steps of the old two-room schoolhouse at Sorrells Springs where my grandma went to school and graduated from the eighth grade in 1926. (It was as far as she got with her education; her family was large and far from wealthy and needed her to help work in what she referred to as “the field.”) The silkiness of the flour would hang around beside the concrete steps and the stones holding up the foundation of the old schoolhouse until rain fell or wind dispersed it. I doubt it anyone would notice. Not very many people visit the schoolhouse now. Still, it’s the place where my grandmother, Ruth Williams then, won her school spelling bee and received a bright blue ceramic bell edged with goldleaf as a prize. I don’t know what else she did there. Maybe she played with her dog Jack, shared a secret with a friend, or smiled at my grandfather or another boy. The milkweed and dandelions beside the old schoolhouse feel like a place where soft pale petals of floursilk could settle, a mattress of feast for ants and hornets in summer. A feeding hole of remembrance and acknowledgment bowing to the Body of ancestry that led people in the neighboring church to wash each other’s feet in big bowls or maybe in the running water of the spring. The flour-body would become a blessing, a way of saying with reverence and love, “All my relations!” before settling shyly into the waiting cimarron clay.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

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This Book

This book woke me up.
This book has a stain of sesame oil on the fourth page, near the end of the recipe.
This book helped me name my cat.
This book has the address of an old friend scrawled in purple ink on the final page.
This book has a crazy woman living in it, trying to bust out of the attic and prone to setting beds on fire.
This book rambles on forever but ends up with an affirmation unlike any other.
This book opened itself right up to a poem about a hawk last night when I went to read it.
This book made my student ask me to call him "Nobody." I said I would, and he started writing poetry.
This book wanders through my dreams at night.
This book contains a bolt of white silk and a quote from Townes van Zandt.
This book spent its nights under my pillow until I finished reading it.
This book wants to grow wings and fly off the deck down into the dry leaves.
This book is illuminated and came back to me after a foolish absence.
This book reminds me of invented colors.
This book was made into a movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. and when I saw the movie I stopped reading the book.
This book is missing the flyleaf and endpage because I used them to start a campfire when all I had in the forest was damp wood.
This book helped me pass a big test.
This book has mobsters and baseball stars in it, and I still wonder what happened.
I was reading this book to my mother the night before she died, and there is a fighting tom in it, and a tree with lights, and the parenthetical holographic remembrancewords "That's nice."
This book is a cathedral.
This book makes me want to go listen to Johnny Cash singing "Ring of Fire" real loud.
This book is part of the ninth grade public school curriculum but shouldn't be. The Cold War is over.
This book is dotted with winsome purple asterisks next to words that aren't verbs.
This book has a picture of my grandparents in it, sitting in a metal glider on their front porch.
This book is really a stage spotlit with mauve footlights and strewn with crumpled roses.
This book makes itself obnoxious when I see it but demands to be read.
This book has a dogwood blossom in it, pressed between the words of Pascal and Buber.
This book delivers a mighty punch and honors all its promises.
This book has a wheel of runaway cheese in it.
My late grandmother spilled something on this book, on the cover and then again in the part with the crazy goatman.
This book won't leave me alone.
This book has a streak of lightning in it that split a woman's life open.
This book hopes it will be written soon.

©Laura Sorrells 2010
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