gestalt

send her to school with a beansprout in her hair, big sister raised her literally up the side of the house, in a basket, for fun and games while mother was teaching and big brother
studied his Latin. born in oklahoma during WW2, her mom's uncle a real oil baron, a real powerhouse. born within days of discovering the biggest oil field of the decade, west edmond, by a doodlebugging Ace, my Mom was the balance, beansprout in her hair and daddy a deacon attorney riding the roller coasters of mid life crises, and moral conundrums. call daddy crazy, she clocked a girl with her metal lunchpail. the cheese didn't even slide off the bun.
     countering the hundreds of millions of gallons of crude, mom's light sweet energy burnt the smoggy clouds off the city, derricks on the lawn of the capitol. out route 66, her grandmother farmed a few hundred acres of soybeans, cotton, and wheat. the barns and fields of childhood, and machines to lug it to the Co-Op, to the troops here and abroad. rosy riveter generation, the pride of a bandanna holding back the untameable.
her uncle the admiral, the filling stations with her mother's name in neon, covering the states roads streets and products, and still not part of it; not from the stone mansion or enormous cement silos holding all the grain of the land, but from the Land itself, the clear sweet water, the germination of will and beauty, growing and rising above.
     trauma and scandal, the snake skin of prosperity against the rocks of morality, her father mad as a hatter they said, and who is to tell now. scars running on fumes, leave them in the garage under an old tarp. her mom took her to Tacoma, for awhile, the fog and sound and whales so close to a high school wearing snow sweaters in fashion shows for Grease. letters from daddy, getting better, missing his perfect girl in the most eloquent humility guided pencil. soft, soft, soft words. i can reckon where Mom got her smarts and humanities, but i don't know how she became the master chef along the way to her dissertation on Gnosticism and Melville. her hair she'd call "mousey" as it changed fashion and color with henna, or curlers.
     my bedroom and little legs go downstairs in the middle of the night, woke up from a dream, crawl in bed with mom and dad. brother in a cradle, handed down, nearby. screens on the windows, and fireflies, and the smell of rain on the way. every meal an elegant production, every food served we tried, even the liver. home made donuts, or waffles strawberries and whipped cream from a glass gallon jar, whose cows were our friends in town a few miles away at the goldenbergs farm by the lowland creek. little legs soaking up the minerals, of the Land.
     mom an angel, but not without her clarion intellect, or devil horns when needed. rivet on our jeans, get us to the school bus in the dark, our lunches in the lunchpail with scooby doo or superman or the such. mom, harvesting asparagus into a big woven basket, barefoot by the chicken coop, with a glass of white wine and a novel riddled with her notations and underlined passages. our library room, with the turntable, and Mimbres pots and blankets, covered in blue books she's be grading, coffee rings on one or two to show she cares too much to sleep. her ashtray a saucer from the kitchen, her cup with lipstick. her olive oil in the bathroom, at night rubbing a dab into her pores after the makeup layers were hauled off her face. my no wrinkle mom, all our laundry swinging on lines out behind the house, wind dried. 
     four jobs at once, or more. staying home with me when i had the chickenpox, reading Charles Dickens together in bed for days. grant and i, towing our kitten litters around in cardboard boxes, over the living room floor if the carpet had been rolled back, for dancing the night before. hosting, one of her many fortes, and a gaggle of friends who were like aunts and uncles to me and my little brother. 
     mom wasn't great at cutting our hair, so when we'd go to dallas, her mom would take us to the barber or to their Church, until we said we'd prefer not to, and that was that. our civil liberty was pretty good. mom had harry byrd K. for a stepfather as an adult, there in dallas, and his odd mix of libertarian, minister, naked National Geographic books, and large leather recliners near the who's who book he'd mention once a year. visiting grandma and HB in dallas was cantelope, grapefruit, oatmeal for breakfast,  and dr pepper at lunch. brother and i were left there for a few weeks one summer, when mom and dad went to europe, sending back toys and postcards.
     driving us here, dropping us off there, our home 5 miles out of town and all those extracurricular things called life. baseball practice, football, violin lessons, basketball games, going to the roller rink, going to the matinee with an actual VW love bug in the lobby at the Leachman. drop us off at multigrahpis for art camp, making ceramic dinosaurs, painting them in glossy Oil.
     putting us in the bath at home, mom, folded towels. mended rips. smoke wafting from her study, in the kitchen, blender making some typical feast as she simultaneously works her way thru grad school tedium and small town politics. there is nothing to edit, everything was good, or better, or part of being human animals out in the pines, all doing firewood together on our 80 acres, the pond hard as asphalt. gestalt, another word in mom's pocket apron.