To Stop Up Time

When I was little I thought the back end of the buck was up there on the other side of the wall, its hooves and haunches and all the parts behind its glassy eyes, in some special closet with no door: a standing coffin in the house. When I was little I thought the TV didn’t work, but it did, and that’s how they got Ken Burns’ Civil War recorded on VHS off Georgia Public Broadcasting. When I was little I thought the carpet felt good, deep pile orange and frosted with Maine Coon hair and the leavings of an old dog called Poochie. And it did feel good, the carpet, and I could lie there on a rainy day and work through every National Geographic ever printed, even the ones from the 1890s, even the ones with the bare-breasted Polynesians, while my grandmother pretended not to know. And it did feel good on rainless days to go dam up the creek, to go rake up the sand of a hundred million years and heap it into earthworks, to stop up time. And it did feel good to wash the eons free again. And before that was a breakfast of new biscuits and jam, and before that my grandmother picked the strawberries herself, wild and tiny, and before that she kept the same biscuit pan for all her married life. And after that it was standing up dead branches for a fort, and digging out old bottles from the earth, and go and check the mail. And after that it was cornbread and tomato from the garden and great pots of potatoes of some kind, and my grandfather made slaw. Slaw was all he knew to do, but he knew to do it well. And after that it was Irish Spring and Aqua Fresh and periwinkle tile they picked out in the 50s, when they built the house, when they got a loan for a thousand dollars, when they framed it all by hand, my mother on the hip. And in the end a blanket, pieced by kin from hand-me-downs and rags, and in the end a lamp for light enough to read, and in the end the tree frogs with their love songs, croaking through the dark. The tree frogs made their music from inheritance. They sang the future into earshot, and I fell asleep beyond them, past the back end of the buck.