Turning

A story about growing older. (There is some harsh language!)

We lived on a porch. The house was merely a decoration, sitting quietly, doors open to let in the outside.  A house full of women.

“There’s nothing to do!” My sister whined on the hot porch in July. Long chocolate hair hung limp on nine-year-old shoulders.

“Yeah this place sucks!” The sand-haired boy from across the street affirmed. He squatted on his haunches at the bottom of the porch steps, tossing stones back and forth.

“If you’re so bored, why don’t you clean your rooms?” My grandmother called from the cool shadows of the house. My sister and I groaned heavily. Chores were a fate worse than boredom. My grandmother’s face appeared at the doorway, chuckling. Her hair was the colour of weathered wood, short and wispy in the baked summer air.  Her skin hung in folds around her apple-green eyes. A flour dusted apron hugged her waste covering a pale cotton dress.

“Here.” She said tossing a couple of sparkling coins onto the pavement. We scrambled for them, in a frenzy of elbows and knees. My grandmother laughed again. “Go get yourselves something from the store.” We obliged gratefully and hurried down the street.

“Let’s get a popsicle!” My sister exclaimed, nose pressed to the freezer glass.

“But we only have enough for one.” I protested.

“We’ll take turns licking it.” She explained, taking my coin and persuading the neighbour boy to give her his as well. A fan blew swirls of dust at us as we waited beside the counter for my sister.

We emerged from the cool shop, hopping from one bare foot to another to keep our feet from melting to the sidewalk. The popsicle disappeared quickly, passed between us. Those were the summer days, made of sticky hands and sugared mouths and lounging on a hot porch.

The summer nights were made of mothers and grandmothers and saying grace. My grandmother cooked every meal in our house. She was the smell of onions and coconut and the sizzle of eggs in a pan. On Sundays my mother would help. She was the blackened smell of a smoking oven and misshapen pancakes. 

My mother was a hard woman. Her arms were thick and strengthened from years of lifting heavy boxes. Her murky sea eyes were creased around the edges and her skin was weathered and scratched like old glass. I’d only ever seen her cry twice, once when my father died and once many years later.

She would come home and sit at the table, shoulders sagging, feet throbbing. Sometimes after dinner she would nap on the couch, while we did the dishes. She didn’t speak much to us, aside from some motherly cussing over the messes we trailed behind us. And when we went to sleep at night she’d come to tuck us in and press her cracked lips to our cheeks. These are the few achievements that my mother was made of.

We were allowed to stay up late in the summer and we’d spend it playing in the grass field behind our house. The grass was full of secrets and pretend worlds and when my sister was older, kisses with a certain sand-haired boy.

And that was how our summer nights passed, my sister and I catching fireflies while my mother snored loudly from our living room.

Then the sky changed and the cicadas stopped whining about the heat. My sister and I put on old uniforms that had gossip and friends and boys stitched in the seams. My sister waded through school with a smile on her face, laughter in her emerald eyes and popularity glowing in her skin. I drowned in it.

School swept this tomboy up in a torrid of fist fights and bad grades and spit me back out into the arms of my waiting mother. Sitting on chairs in the middle of the kitchen, her tongue would lash at me as she stuck packs of frozen vegetables to my black eyes and broken noses. My grandmother would cluck her disapprovement from the sink. My sister would be out on the porch of summer, laughing with her friends.

“What were you thinking?” My mother said on one occasion as I was spitting blood into the kitchen sink.

“He called me a c**t.” I sassed. The word tasted like burnt toast and copper in my mouth.

“And that gave you the right to break his nose?” She said tiredly, pressing a paper towel to the cut in my lip.

“F**k yes!” I grinned. I was a teenager, full of attitude and a new-found appreciation for cussing.

“Don’t use that language in this house!” My grandmother scolded. A burst of laughter trickled into the room from outside on the porch.

“Would you SHUT THE F**K UP!?” I screamed at the door, only receiving a smattering of giggles in response. My grandmother grabbed a wooden spoon and held it under my nose.

“Now you listen here, girl.” She lectured. “I don’t want to hear you treating your sister that way. And I don’t want to hear about you getting into anymore fights at school. I don’t care if they call you all assortments of names! You are not to lay a hand on any of them, or you’ll have me to contend with. Do you hear me?”

I nodded, looking down to hide the smirk on my face.

“Good.” My grandmother said, turning back to her oven. She continued to berate me as she worked, not letting me leave the kitchen for over an hour. Even my mother couldn’t take it and fled to the safety of her bedroom.

“Dinner!” Grandma yelled after I’d been thoroughly beaten over the head with disappointment. And the chill autumn nights were filled with sweet hot pumpkin and roasted pecans.

Winter blew and we all grew a little older. My sister wore a white satin dress and moved down the street from our summer porch with the sand-haired boy. I raised children in the shadows of a city. We’d talk on the phone for a while. How was grandmother doing? Was she still baking ginger spiced cookies and thick potato soup? How were the kids? When was I coming home?

Soon, the answers got quick and vague. I picked up the phone only when it rang and when I did it often screamed at me. Why hadn’t I visited? Did I not want my mother to see her grandchildren? Did I not care how my sister was doing?

 Eventually the past winters made of snowball fights and names written on a foggy bus window stopped calling. The new winter days were the smell of stale coffee and fresh ink on paper. Winter nights were recycled pizza boxes and channels flickering.

Children fought over computer time and video games. The ninth floor apartment became a battleground. A woman, a mother made of hot cocoa, tawny hair and faded bruises didn’t know how to hold a wooden spoon under children’s noses and a man made of thick granite had to send them to their rooms.

Winter melted away like marshmallows in the rain. Spring came dark in the form of a quiet phone call. I kissed a man of granite goodbye at a musty cold train station. I stepped quietly up the steps of a hot summer porch, expecting the smell of lemon bars and lavender.

My mother sat in pieces at the kitchen table. I thought the room smelled cold with a lingering scent of onions and coconut as I caught her tears on my cheek. My sister and I dressed in black cotton that got darker in the tear drops from storming skies. Spring days were remembering onions and coconut, sweet hot pumpkin and roasted pecans, ginger spiced cookies and thick potato soup, lemon bars and lavender. It was sitting on the hot summer porch and laughing about chasing fireflies, burnt dinners and fist fights. It was promises of remembrance and goodbye hugs with sand-haired children.

Spring nights were tears on a speeding train, watching city lights dance like fireflies. It was discovering how to hold a cloth to cut lips and scold with a wooden spoon. It was moving out of a newly emptied ninth-floor apartment to a hot summer porch with a house just for decoration. It was eating burnt home-cooking with laughter and a soft man made of granite. It was wrapped in blankets on a porch, skin wrinkled with years in the folds and watching the sun rise to a new hot summer day.

Reviews

[TJ]

what a beautiful story.

you illustrate so well the different seasons we go throw in our lives from childhood to adulthood, and you the pictures you paint with your words are amazing. I would love to see a longer version of this same story

"The popsicle disappeared quickly, passed between us." i'd try to reword this sentence

good job

[Richard Beard]

I try to take to editing when I am critiquing, because it was ingrained in me in college many years ago, as I was the editor in most my classes. Call me a teacher's pet.

But you have just put me back in my place. Whereas I would love to throw some constructive criticism at you, I'm going to just be honest.

What you've done here is the most important thing any writer can do...tell a story that draws the reader into it. Didn't care to find any flaws in it. It was just plain enjoyable. It is a beautifully rendered, decsriptive piece using wonderful turns of words and the rhythm is something akin to a steady, tribal drumbeat (African, perhaps). From the opening line about the house being a decoration for the porch, I was in!

Sorry to be long-winded, but if you have published work for sale, I'll buy it. If you don't, go and publish, even if you have to do it yourself. Meanwhile, I am going to take some lessons from it and hope to improve my own writing. :)

[Thomas Fitzgerald]

Very descriptive, a well faceted piece, full of turmoil and absorptivity, well done, great read.

[kelseyrenee]

Wow, this is really something. Full of detail and a unique description of each character. Really quite beautiful.