Out of respect, we will paint our faces silver.

I sat with an older woman and her grandchild, in a convoluted past where I was dating someone and lived in the heart of their family for a brief space of time, years ago. We talked about the weather, the lush Richmond heat, the mosquitoes, lunch. I remember the smell of old varnish on wood, and natural light filtering in wherever it could, struggling to penetrate years of dust and sadness. The little girl, maybe 7 at the time, played on the floor surrounded with a myriad of pieces and parts of popular toys - tiny worlds for Polly Pocket, shoes and perfume bottles for Bratz dolls, Barbie stuff. She was silent, focused on her activity, putting things on and taking them off, her processes and curiosity hidden inside her slender frame.

'You know it's a Blue Moon tonight?' the grandmother asked me.


'A Blue Moon must be made of Blue cheese because you can't have a blue rock unless you paint it.' The little girl replied matter-of-factly without looking up, without pausing in her exploration of fitting pieces to parts and considering them. Her hands continued to move, but the fringe of straight blond hair kept her face hidden. I remember feeling a hit, like a singular drum beat in the center of my body, I was floored by how pure and logical her reasoning was within the scope of her awareness of the world and how it worked.


'She painted a rock blue in class today.' The grandmother smiled indulgently. The girl didn't respond.


A few weeks later the whole family took that little girl on a whirlwind vacation at Disney World, paid top dollar for the full Princess experience. A handful of aunts and great aunts and grandma pooled their resources to wander around in the Florida heat, their heavyset, aging crew shuttling her from Cinderella makeover to dinner with Belle from Beauty and the Beast. When they returned, their suitcases were packed to the brim with princess paraphernalia, they had taken a bunch of empty suitcases just for this reason.

Not long after that, the little girl informed her grandmother that she didn't want to hurt her feelings, but she was over the whole princess thing. Even though the grandmother couldn't help but see the humor in the situation, I could see that she mourned the loss of that experience. I'm sure part of her recognized it was more for her than the little girl the entire time.

That relationship fell apart, and the current has drawn me far from those people, but I think about her sometimes, that little girl. Her wide blue eyes are framed by sturdy glasses now, and I wonder how that shifts what adults see when they look at her, with her long, lean build and long blond hair.

A blue moon is an additional full moon that appears in a subdivision of a year: either the third of four full moons in a season, or a second full moon in a month of the common calendar. The phrase has nothing to do with the actual color of the moon. The suggestion has been made that the term "blue moon" for "intercalary month" arose by folk etymology, the "blue" replacing the no-longer-understood belewe, 'to betray'. The original meaning would then have been "betrayer moon", referring to a full moon that would "normally" (in years without an intercalary month) be the full moon of spring, while in an intercalary year, it was "traitorous" in the sense that people would have had to continue fasting for another month in accordance with the season of Lent.

a seated figure with a sword in her hand,

 

 

The other day I received a text from the mother I haven't spoken to in almost 4 years. Usually I'll receive something whiny or conniving from her, trying to figure out what would be most effective in inciting a response from me.

I opened the text, and it was simply a photo of a man sized purple rooster sculpture.

I had no clue why she would have sent that, maybe she was trying a new tactic, maybe she had lost her last marble. It wasn't until I was describing it to my little sister over the phone that its meaning finally struck me.

Purple Chicken.

Years ago, my mother would load up my younger siblings into the car and prepare for a road trip to different Podunk towns to go visit my step father in one of the many penitentiaries across the state of Florida. As a repeat offender, he ended up in places we would never have traversed the flat ribbon of road and scrub brush to stay in for a few nights, for a few hours of visitor time on each day of the weekend. I went to watch over them, my only family. I stayed awake as we drove in the endless darkness of night, a large worn atlas in my lap, my younger siblings (his children) asleep in the back of our massive 78'chevy nova, the one with 8 cylinders and no speedometer. It was practically a boat. My little brother and sister fought like cats when they were awake, all claws and teeth and slaps and screeches, but in the back seat together, the always slept shoulder to shoulder, head leaning on head, looking so similar they might have been twins.

The freckles on my little sister's sleeping face will be forever merged in my mind's eye with the stars in the huge, indigo, bowl shaped sky that we drove under, dwarfing us against the landscape. Delilah kept us company on the radio, listening as people called in to ask for a song, and to tell her their lovelorn stories. I learned so much about sadness and longing and the pain involved in loving someone, on those midnight drives, and about these individuals living their entire lives in little spread out towns with less than 500 people and only one church to gather in, that loneliness can seem as vast as that sky at midnight sometimes. How perspective and priorities can be engulfing or freeing, depending on the context.

We began to notice, my mother and I, that almost every gas station we stopped at had large photos advertising a fried chicken bar inside. The Florida sunshine had bleached away the yellow shades needed to make brown tones, and had left washes of blue and pink that pooled into dark purple in the crevasses of the fried skin of the pile of drumsticks. Once when she came back out from paying for gas, her nose wrinkled, she told me that the photos weren't lying about the color of the chicken in that particular establishment. It became a joke, asking if anyone wanted any purple chicken before we ran inside to pay, even years later on other kinds of road trips.

Its a tangy sour memory she brought up with her text. Its impossible not to feel a sharp twinge of almost nostalgia, for childhood where we laughed so we didn't have to feel the horror of living our specific reality. Impossible to ignore the intimacy of that shared experience, something that no one but the two of us could really fathom in its fullness. What I find unfathomable is that she probably cannot conceive of the images it calls out of my body even now: of my then-newly ripe, pubescent body, terrifying in its stark sexual suggestiveness that seemed impossible to hide in the baggy clothes I draped myself in, being offered up to this adult world I wanted no part of. Shaking my bra out for the guards, rarely women, before we could pass into the room full of inmates and their visiting loved ones. The stepfather I hated, openly talking about my budding body, how large my breasts were getting - to my mother, who giggled inanely, unwilling to make the boundaries I could not, unwilling to protect me in any way. Right in front of my young siblings, embedding god knows what into the brain of my baby sister, about her body and its boundaries. Feeling naked in that prison visiting room, undressed by the words and eyes of the one person I hated most in the world with no one to defend me, while he stuffed himself with Hot Pockets from the vending machines, since the prison food was so bland.

Since I had to construct my own shield, without parents to protect me, I am finally starting to see how the truth of my upbringing bubbles up and chokes me as I wade through deep and thorough intellectual territories. As a creature living in between worlds, my inheritance is unclear, everywhere I go I feel like a little bit of an imposter. I can't tell what character I am in my own story, so I don't know what my boundaries and freedoms are composed of - that my background will invalidate me in a room full of thinkers and theorists, realities of a brutal animal existence that dispels the beauty and symmetry of so many ideas; that I can't possibly be as experienced as I am in the labor world because I am white, college educated and female, everything I have must be from my privilege made manifest, rather than the blood and sweat and tears and rage and hunger of my human body.

What is my domain, my territory, my home? How can I be defined by the sad, gross, backwater world I was raised in? And how does denying relationship with so much of myself hinder my relationships with others? How has this shield become a wall, this shield that has defined me for so long, who will I be without it, but that voiceless, pubescent girl, naked in a room full of strangers?

You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.

What is winter to a child of the tropics? A myth, a figment of my imagination?

Here I am, daughter of the sunshine state, listening to the boozy old school jazz pumping through the speakers in the starbucks overlooking downtown Jersey City and all of the piles of snow that have drifted and swirled and delicately poured forth from the weather gods in the sky. Winter here is real, and serious, just like the NYC summer - people die in NYC heat. Summer in NYC is real too, and more serious than any summer I ever experienced in my childhood on the shores of perfect blue-green 95 degree water.

In this harsh reality, that same blue-green water and baby powder sand haunts my dreams, and homesickness strikes at the most inopportune moments... like when I am posing for an art class, and I can feel the blush of warmth creep up and redden my body on the model stand, laid bare before an audience, and the brightness of tears standing out suddenly in my eyes. But that too seems now the stuff of dreams, something larger than life, like the tall tales of my childhood - memories of my life as told to me by the other people who experienced them, from when I was too young to remember.

Yet, it is sweetly exciting to walk through the gentle, friendly flakes, wet little kisses on my face. It is profound to look out at the street in the morning, and see the trash and cars, even the black, ugly asphalt given a new leash on life, the traces of man hidden by an perfect blanket of crystalline innocence. A cup of cocoa simply isn't as beautiful as it is during an intense snowfall, and nothing is more exciting than waking up and realizing that you are trapped, so work is out of the question. We are all children during a snow day, like playing hooky from responsibility. We inherently know the trouble that comes later, dealing with the plows, unburying cars and bikes, trudging through the gray sucking slush that finds its way into your shoes, no matter how prepared you thought you were. The gritty crunch and slip of the rock salt to melt the snow that melted, that refroze into treacherous pools of slick and sly ice. We know it will suck later. But however inconvenient it may become, it seems to have fallen with the best intentions, to baptize us new, to give us a fresh start.

I can't help being fascinated by this bizarre phenomenon of snow, like turning 21 and finding yourself surrounded by alcohol for the first time in your life - how could you say no to exploring its affects, and savoring the pros and cons?

Florida has a much different mood in the way of weather gods. There is no silly sweet magic in the air currents. Our rainfall may last a few minutes, but it falls in a flood of bitterness, every second as obscuring and wounded as a first love, before disappearing into a memory almost as soon as it started. My anger is often the same way, invisible till the moment my heart breaks, and suddenly everything is ok again. But I wouldn't call the malevolent mealstrom of the Hurricane as real as summer and winter in the north... it is such a massive and pregnant form, leaving a path of utter destruction. It is the stuff of gods and titans, and it is like a cosmic act of war. You don't hope for a hurricane day, you evacuate a week before its projected arrival, before it is impossible to escape on the clogged roads. You try to get as far inland as you can to avoid being swept up in floods along the coast. There is no hiding from something so massive and heartless. It isn's pretty. There is no way to protect yourself, or those you love.

All you can do is hope and pray it will be fickle in its path. That it will hit someone else, ruin other people's lives, not yours. That it won't make it to the warm blue-green waters of the gulf, the rich salty womb I swam in before I was born.

So I fortify myself against the icy wind. I rip off the blankets in the morning braced for the inevitable shock of cold. I step outside everyday with a 'fuck you' to the early morning chill. And I weigh my options.