A house, divided

An abstract version of the "house" quilt pattern, circa 1950s or '60s.
This quilt and others can be found at Folk Artisans.

Really, the yard signs tell the story.

There, among the fading petunias, were the plastic signs in navy and white, their respectful, conservative white lettering spelling out support for the Republican ticket. And in between them, looming over them, was a piece of plywood three times as large, and sprayed on the front in florescent pink were the words "Nader/Gonzalez."

"Don't expect to see that sign still standing when you come home tonight, boy!" the father said.

The young man only shrugged, and left his father standing in the drive way. In the past few years the man had turned old, strong still, but now old. His beard and head were filled with gray, and he spent many warm autumn afternoons sitting in a plastic lawn chair watching the traffic head home. He'd raise one hand in recognition of a neighbor's car, while the other rested on his belly, balanced between his thighs, suspenders slung over broad bare shoulders.

When I first moved onto H Street, the father mowed his postage stamp yard shirtless, sitting atop one of those riding lawn mowers. When he was done, he'd climb into his semi-truck and ease it around the block while checking out the neighbors' yards. But as his shoulders stooped and his son's broadened, the boy took over the lawn care, and the neighborhood inspections came less frequently.

His McCain signs were the first to go up on the street, divided -- almost house by house -- over the country's political future. The neighborhood has been written up in the International Herald Tribune. The city's been spotlighted on National Public Radio. Pundits say that who wins the county, wins the country. And while he could wave and smile to the Obama supporter, his son's homemade sign -- now dominating the yard -- mocked him.

"It's been World War III around here," his wife told me one evening as we chatted in the street.

Fists banged the table. Accusations flew. Someone threatened to put an Obama sign in the yard as well.

"Everyone's entitled to their own opinions," the mother said, taking a long drag on her cigarette. "First Amendment, you know. But me? I'm like Switzerland. I'm staying neutral. My vote is gonna remain private."

The young man stomped off to work. The old man stomped off to get another McCain sign. And that evening and the many since, the sun's orange rays glowed on both plywood and plastic.

Coloring a cold

Photo courtesy of Stryker w@sp

A nasty head cold, a persistent cough and a rollicking stomach bug are making their way through the family this week. This tiny poem came out of committee.

Sharp pencil hits floor.
Baby grabs. Mom squawks, "No! No!"
Mom grabs. Baby squawks.

To start the weekend off right!

My skin or my soul

Photo courtesy of amazonactivist.

Shelly followed me around the playground, not close enough for anyone to imagine we were friends, but behind me like some mangy, maggot-eating dog with its tail between its legs, and behind her came a cloud of stink, the smell of old, stale dirt melted with sweat to form a crust over the skin. The other kids were beginning to notice.

"Why's she following you?"

"Who?"

"Shelly. Are you friends?"

And the word was spit out like dirt. For even here, where everyone lived in trailers and most backyards included a junk car, there was a pecking order among us children, a ranking built on insults and exclusions, and at the bottom of the hierarchy was Shelly. She was the fifth-grade version of the thick, polluted froth found along the seashore. She was the brown foam of fat that collected at the edges of a boiling soup pot. She was scum.

And I was her secret ... something -- not friend, though. I felt sorry for her, sorry that she lived in a dirty family with dirty brothers who ate their boogers. I felt sorry for her when I saw her mother, whose skin was gray-brown as the cigarette smoke that hovered around her, and who smelled like B.O, sorry that she had a mother who bought cigarettes instead of soap for her children, lots of smooth, white, clean bars of soap to wash dirt out of matted hair and grime out of clothes. I felt sorry for Shelly, but I didn't like her.

She was surly and sour, stomping on the bus every morning and throwing herself into an empty seat where she'd stare out the window. She had dirt on her neck and knees, her arms, her face, everywhere. I wanted to take a fingernail and scrape the skin, erasing the dirt and leaving a white streak on her arm and crud under my own nail. Her stink settled around her and kids held their noses and moved. Some gagged and choked. Shelly scowled, eyes narrowed to slits and teeth bared, yellow and fuzzy for lack of a toothbrush.

"You have to be kind to her," Mom said, "like Jesus loved the poor and outcast."

I wrinkled my nose and breathed into my jacket for the rest of the bus ride, but I didn't change seats.

I'd been secretly writing notes to Shelly for a little while now, letters penciled, then folded and slipped to my teacher, who slipped them to Shelly. The teacher had approached my mom and me with the idea after her own efforts to share soap and clothing went unused. Maybe, she said, another child would have more success with this angry, filthy girl.

Shelly's only friend was a tape deck and a stack of Beatles tapes. She'd cradle the tape deck against her ear and listen to it on the bus. She listened to it on the playground as she walked the perimeter. But the music that warbled from the small microphone was an insult to the headbangers, ready to pound and pump head and fist for AC/DC. And so when she walked near some boys, one -- David, skinny and round shouldered, face coming to a nosy point like a rat's -- stuck out a leg and tripped her.

She sprawled into the gravel, tape deck bouncing out of her hand, popping open, tape flying. She jumped up, snarling, smarting, palms scraped and bleeding, blinking away tears. David tossed his sheet of hair out of his eyes and laughed.

"Leave her alone," I said.

"Shut up, scum-bag. She's scum, and her music's scum, and you're scum, too."

He kicked at the cassette-recorder, sending small rocks and dirt flying, and spit. Shoulders hunched, he walked away. But David remembered. Shelly remembered. And as kids began to avoid me, Shelly slunk closer, shadowing me during recess, shuffling behind me, not looking, not talking, but there all the same. My fall within the school hierarchy was clean and quick as a knife cut.

I had never been popular, but I had a true friend, a best friend I thought would shield me against the pecking order, but instead she stood back and let me bleed. First, she avoided me at lunch, then at recess, too. I phoned her after school one day to ask why, and she said kids were calling me scum.

"Do you want one friend that loves you, or a lot of friends who just like you?" I asked her.

"I want to have a lot of friends."

I hung up the phone and cried.

Most of the kids in the school were poor, and many of us ate meals bought with Food Stamps. I wasn't scum, I was clean, took a bath, used soap. But now, like Shelly, I was alone -- she with the Beatles and I with my books. I burrowed into books in order to forget I had no one to talk to. I carried them on the bus, took them on the playground, hid them in my desk. This was my routine until a new girl arrived and chose me as her friend. Once again, I had someone to share lunch with and talk with during recess, and, once again, I was being shadowed.

"Why's she following you?"

"Who?"

"Her. Are you friends?"

I turned and looked at Shelly, stared at her dirty clothes and tangled hair and her cloud of stink, and then spoke to her for the first and last time.

"Go away!" I said. "Stop following me. I'm not your friend."

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. It aims to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion. Global issues like poverty are extremely complex. There is no simple, clear answer. By asking thousands of different people to give their viewpoints and opinions, Blog Action Day creates an extraordinary lens through which to view these issues. Each blogger brings their own perspective and ideas. Each blogger posts relating to their own blog topic. And each blogger engages their audience differently. For others, click here.

Time warp

Photo courtesy of jared.

If I could live at a different time in history, I would choose to watch the universe give birth to itself. I would like to see stars explode, spewing hot gases and dust into a dark, cold space. I would like to watch great swirling clouds of gases cool and glom and wring themselves of water. I would like to see particles of dust congeal into solid ground that I would one day stand upon, and I would like to be blinded by the shafts of light and warmth from the first rays of our sun.

Particles of stardust reside in my body, in my children's body, and in yours. In our dark flesh, we carry the glitter and gas that marked the dawn of time, when the universe heaved and shook with infinite possibility.

To read other people's choices for living in a different historical time, check out Sunday Scribblings.

Forbidden

Photo courtesy of mywoods.

Buried deep under her blankets, Connie woke to whooping and hollering from her little brother, who was clomping down the hall in boots, pajamas sticking out from the end of his snow pants.

"Connie! Get up! Get up! It snowed!"

Jason tugged at the blankets, and Connie poked her head out. Snow! She jumped up and scratched at the frost on the window until she could see outside. The snow was deep enough to cover sagebrush and clumps of cheatgrass, turning the desert into a giant version of Connie's own lumpy bed. With snow this deep, she knew the bus wouldn't make it down the long dirt road and school would be canceled.

It didn't take long for Connie to join Jason on the hill, really just a bump no bigger than the family's Honda Civic, but steep enough to ride a sled onto the alkali flat. When they got tired of sledding, they took turns pulling each other across the hard-pan until the sled tipped Jason into a tumbleweed. When Connie tried to help him up, he screamed that she had done it on purpose and began chasing her across the desert with part of the sticker bush until he gave up and went inside.

Connie slipped around the side of the trailer and in through the back door, and called her best friend, Michelle. They liked to say they lived on the same street, and they did, technically. Connie lived at one end of Shadow Lane and Michelle lived at the other, and between their homes were four miles of washboard road, two stop signs and one abandoned sheepherder's shack. Nothing else. Besides sharing a street, they both had annoying little brothers, they both were skinny, and neither had started growing breasts like some of the girls in fifth grade. Michelle's mom had given her a training bra, which Michelle used to sling pebble-sized jackrabbit turds at her brother.

Holding the phone to her ear, Connie stretched its cord down the hall and into the kitchen where her mom was pulling stickers out of Jason's forehead.

"Mom, Michelle invited me over. Can I go?" Connie asked.

"Only if you take your brother, and only if you walk," her mom said. "Dad had to take the truck because of the snow, and I'm not driving the Honda on these roads."

Jason grinned and Connie glared.

"Did you hear that, Michelle? I can go! But you better find your slingshot, because my brother has to come."

The whole walk there, Jason complained. By the end of the first mile, he had pulled off his hat and gloves, and by the second mile, Connie was carrying his coat. When they reached mile three (the sheepherder's shack), the snow on the road was beginning to melt.

"Come on, Jason! If the snow melts, we can't go sledding."

She yanked on his arm and squinted. Sunlight bounced off the snow, bright and sharp as diamonds, stinging her eyes and making them water. Far off she could see the second stop sign, which meant Michelle's home was close. Unlike Connie, Michelle lived in a real house, not a trailer, a two-story house nestled in hills that flattened into fields of alfalfa. From Michelle's house they could walk to a ditch, choked by tule and cattails, and follow that finger of blue through the fields and into the cottonwood trees that lined the Carson River until it dumped into the Lahontan Reservoir.

But now bare tree and dry tule were cloaked in snow. The four children sledded until the boys complained of the cold and went inside, leaving the girls to follow the tracks of rabbit and quail down to the frozen ditch. A small bird pecked at cattail fluff. Connie stepped onto the ice and feathery cracks spread under her feet. Michelle snapped off a column of tule and its dry husk released a small cloud of dust. She held it in her fingers like a cigarette.

"Do you think you could smoke a tule?" Connie asked.

Michelle shrugged. "It looks like a cigarette," she said.

"Let's try."

They smiled at each other. Michelle ran back to the house for matches. Connie walked further out into ice and cattail, looking for tule as thin and round as cigarettes. The tall dry stalks folded and bent creating small chairs and couches to sit on, and that's where Michelle found her.

Connie shook the tule free of snow and Michelle held the match to one end. It smoldered, embers glowing and then fading out.

"You have to hold it up to your mouth," Michelle said. "That's what my grandma does. When she lights it, she breathes in."

A second match. Connie took a deep breath and exhaled through the tule, blowing ash and dust at Michelle. They threw themselves back into the tule and snow and hooted.

"Noooo! Breathe in, not out. Here, let me try," Michelle said.

She put the end of the tule in her mouth, took a big puff as the match was lit, and spit out dust. Coughing and laughing she tossed the tule onto the ice.

"This is dumb," she said.

The girls lay on their backs in the snow and looked up at the sun, at birds darting overhead, at the dusty snake of smoke from the house slithering across the sky.

"Wanna try and kiss?" Connie asked.

"Okay."

"Just for practice. So when a boy wants to, we know what to do," she said.

"Okay."

They rolled over so their faces were inches apart.

"You have to close your eyes," Connie said.

They inched closer and bumped noses, red and a little runny from the cold.

"Ouch!"

"I think we have to tilt our heads a little so our noses won't bump," Michelle said.

Lips puckered, pressed, parted.

"Eeeew!"

"That's what you're supposed to do!" Connie said, giggling.

"That's gross. I'm never going to kiss a boy."

They rolled away from each other, and stood up, eyes searching for something to settle on, something other than each other. They locked onto their brothers making angels in front of the house, and headed back through melting snow and scabby patches of desert.

Prompted by Sunday Scribblings' challenge to write about something forbidden.

A wedding

Photo courtesy of WTL photos.

Ellie couldn't get married in her father's church. Not the Father, just her father, God's enforcer of commandments, confession and communion, said it couldn't be done. Never mind that six months earlier her uncle, married 40 years, paid a priest to annul his marriage in order to remarry. Never mind that his six adult children, now all bastards in the eyes of the Pope, weren't there to watch him stand at the altar with a wafer of Christ stuck to the roof of his mouth and kiss his wrinkled bride. No, her dad said, no matter what the state said, in the eyes of God, Frank was still married, and therefore couldn't marry Ellie in the family church with his two small sons as witnesses.

Ellie's dad had built the church right next to her grandfather's mobile home and just 50 feet from her own family's double wide. It was a squat building with a steeple that cast a long, wavy shadow across a desert ruled by dust devils, fierce, erratic winds that tore at their trailer's tin siding, and blew sand through the window cracks so that Ellie woke in the morning with grit in her teeth.

But once when she was nine she woke to a miracle of angels' wings, of a wind that carried sand from the four corners of the desert and built a mountain in her yard. She ran outside in her nightgown and joined her brothers and sisters climbing the slope, bare feet sunk deep into the mountain's soft sides until, breathless and hot, she reached the top where she was high enough to see over the roof of the family's trailer.

Eventually the mountain melted into hill, then puddle, and finally was nothing but a shovelful of sand that her father mixed with cement to form the foundation of the church. Figuring that the mountain was a sign from God, the church was built on the same spot. They filled it with statues of the Virgin Mary, hung a crucifix of Christ writhing in agony upon the cross, and hired a retired priest to come out once a month and mumble a service in Latin.

Ellie loved the church. She loved the black lace she pinned to her hair, loved the narrow, creaking stairs to the loft where she and her sisters, and sometimes an aunt and cousins from Carson City, sang Ave Marias and Kýrie, eléisons, their clear, high notes disturbing the fine sand blown in by the wind so that music and dust floated down onto the bowed heads of the (forgiven!) sinners. But she wouldn't be married there. Instead, she was getting married at the Senior Center, built a few months ago but already smelling of old people. She had risen early and driven over to the center to air it out.

She opened the door and wrinkled her nose at the smell of fish sticks and peppermint and urine. Quickly, she walked past tables and folding chairs that had been set up the night before, past the D.J.'s equipment, and the long table where the wedding party would sit and face the guests. As she went, she opened windows to let the wind in, the sand in.

She inhaled the hot air, sweetened by sage and tumbleweed, and stopped at the card table where the wedding cake would sit. She lifted the heavy silver knife that she and Frank would use to cut the cake. Frank and his boys. The three had to sample every cake in the bakery before settling on spice. Spice cake with cream cheese frosting, she had won that round at least. She locked the door and headed home to get ready for the wedding.

The ceremony was over in 10 minutes. Ellie had spent the whole time trying to remember the name of the man marrying them. Frank had introduced her a week earlier, told her who he was, but now as she stared at his red nose and cowboy shirt, smelling whiskey, she missed her cue, and Frank had to squeeze her hand to prompt her. "Oh!" she cried. "I do." And the guests laughed and the county commissioner? Judge? Bartender? laughed too. And she smiled up at her husband as he bent down and kissed her.

Friends filed past her and Frank and the boys, a family now. When her new sons grew tired of the compliments and handshakes, they joined the other children sliding across the dance floor in their socks, amusing the women who tapped their feet in time to the music and eyed their men, who were tipping back their chairs, tipping back their beer bottles. Ellie danced, with Frank, with her father, with her sons, holding their small hands and dancing in a circle, her dress swirling about their feet, tripping them so they fell in a fit of giggles to the floor.

And then it was time, the D.J. said, to make a toast and cut the cake. Children squeezed through the crowd to get to the front of the cake table. Couples who had slipped out in search of dark corners of the desert and soft sand to push their bodies into wandered back inside. Frank and Ellie wrapped their fingers around the knife and cut the cake.

"Should she be nice, folks?" the D.J. asked as Ellie tossed back her head and laughed, smooshing the cake into Frank's face.

Frank didn't wait for the D.J.'s prompts. He took his own piece and pushed it into Ellie's face, her head snapped back, she stumbled and was caught by her dad. Smiles. Glasses. Eyes. Laughter. All froze. Ellie's father pushed her behind him and turned back to Frank.

"Touch my daughter like that again and you'll regret it."

"Oh, Dad. It was my fault. I did it first."

Ellie moved past him, reaching for napkins to wipe away the frosting, praying she could erase the angry look on her husband's face, praying for the wind to bury her in sand.

In response to Sunday Scribblings' writing prompt: Weddings.