Family Ties

April 13, 2017

Sluggish breezes roll up from the rocky ground and assault me with breakers of searing heat. It’s so hot, I might be on Venus, yet I feel the heavy weight of gravity. Maybe I’m on Jupiter? More likely I’m finally and fatally pinned by the cholla that currently hunt me, haunt me, here in the desert that holds me. I am earth bound, a wanderer seeking release, walking through space. Still a stranger in a strange land, only now a later day saint; a setting-sun Aquarian. Aquarius is the water bearer. I bring water to the desert crossers.

Water is sacred. Water is life. I am alive.

In the summer, my mother always smelled of Coppertone and coffee and cigarettes. Childhood days at the lake, gentle breezes with Mama sunning her perfect bronze beauty, fifteen minutes per side to make sure the color was even. Kids splashing and the jukebox playing. She’d give me quarters and ask me to play Sam Cooke. “I ran all the way home, just to say I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry, Mama. I sang to you but you died anyway, no longer young or bronzed, backlit by a flickering ballgame on TV. The faint smell of hospital cleaner scented the hiss of air forced into lungs that resented the intrusion.

You floated away on an ocean of morphine, waves lapping your raft with a gentle goodbye.

Blind at birth, his optic nerve a gristly white, my brother relied heavily upon his senses of smell and touch as a young child. When at two he bit my mother, she instinctively bit him back. I laughed uneasily when I learned this. They reached an accord, but who knows at what cost? Relationships are not free. Everything has its price.

Our childhood, bred in the carnival and shaped by the duck-and-cover drills of the Cold War, mimicked a sophisticated and educational adult cartoon. With Mom as our ever Fearless Leader, my brother played Boris to my Natasha. No-goodniks for sure. A natural historian, my brother knew the address of every place we ever called home, the name of each faceless relation, all the arcane details of our shared lives. Boris curated our reality; I crafted our fantasy. Together we balanced an off kilter world.

As he grew, he recovered some vision, but unlike Homer--the blind bard--he was never visionary. My brother’s panoramic view was steadfastly fixed in the rearview mirror. Our weekly journeys to the coin laundry or the Kash ‘n Karry were hyper-charged, taking us beyond the realm of shopping lists, with fantastic tales of Vlad the Impaler, Catherine the Great, and Suleiman the Magnificent. Possibility was expanded with each episode he unreeled.

His exodus left me wandering in another desert in another time, seeking relief.

© 2017 Joan Cichon   All Rights Reserved