This morning, curled around the back side of you, face against shoulder blade, the smell of your warmth mingling with my breath, the familiarity moved me. I wrote lines about it in my head, though none return now as naturally as they rose from the ashes of sleep. The cat saw I was awake and climbed my body to haunch under my chin. You roused, looked at me with narrow sleepy eyes. My fingers slid along your arm. “Hands cold,” you mumbled. I pulled the covers to your shoulder and caressed the parts of quilt now shaped like you, but the dogs had heard us, and they whined and pawed the crate door. So I arose and set the day in motion, took the dogs out, fed them, opened the blinds, started coffee, checked the weather, dressed. Soon you are up, and thus we begin another day we will live together. Granddaddy used to say, “Everything gets over with.” And I know this will too. One day. But not today. This morning started with the smell of you, and what will someday end was today everything I could count on. © 2021 Deborah E. Moore, All Rights Reserved
Author: Deb
Poet, essayist, novelist, writing instructor, music lover, and general optimist.
Exposition of a Modern Time
I’ve read this book. I can’t remember who wrote it. King? Atwood? Orwell? If the three of them could have a love child (surely possible in this narrative), and if that love child wrote a book, this would be it. A dystopian future complete with a virus, an insurrection, fearless mobs, cages of children, knees on necks, wildfires, deaths, conspiracy theories behind each, families divided like the blue and the grey. I lived 55 years in a dormant volcano, mistaking quiet for death. What needs to be sacrificed to the gods to put them back to sleep? Whom should we throw from the ridge? We don’t even talk about the “new normal” anymore. It’s passé. We make adjustments that may be permanent Who knows? We hang on to shards of hope. A vaccine. An inauguration. A miracle. Garden hoses aimed at rapids of lava. Each climax, the narrative arcs up again. Chapter after chapter of rising action, new inciting incidents, still more characters. Epic. Sweeping. Homeric. Absurdist. I need John to smoke a doobie and bring the revelations. I need denouement. I need the movie rights sold and that film to stay in the can. I need a final chapter, resolution, loose ends tied up in neat little bows. They lived happily ever after. That was the ending they promised us in the seventies. In the middle-class seventies. In the white middle-class seventies. Wars and epidemics and despots lived only in history books and countries with jungles. They never told us we were children living on the blank page between chapters. I’ve read this book, but I’m only now living this story. I don’t recommend it right before bedtime. © 2021 Deborah E. Moore, All Rights Reserved
Shepherd’s Pie
Twice I’ve had shepherd’s pie. The first time I was maybe three, probably two, back when children graduated from high chairs much earlier and rode bikes with no helmets. Back when I stood in the middle of the bench car seat holding onto daddy’s shoulder while he drove, his extended arm my only seat belt. The pie was mother's attempt to make something special on a meager grocery budget. Once, when we were down to our last mason jar of green beans, my sister and I, toddlers, oblivious, mom made the green beans, seasoned them as if part of a grand meal, set the table, poured the tea, put the beans in a glass serving dish (a cookpot on the table would never do), lifted the dish from the counter, and then, hands wet, the glass slipped, and the green beans exploded on the kitchen floor, spiced with shards too splintered to remove. And mom sat down right there in the middle of the green beans and cried. The shepherd’s pie happened around the same time. Sixties food wasn’t fancy. Grocery stores didn’t stock arugula and truffle oil and quinoa. Life was more meatloaf and mashed potatoes. But, shepherd’s pie, it was all mixed together. And was that a pea? I didn’t like it on sight. Dad said, “you eat what your mother prepares.” I tried and gagged. My sister and I slumped in our chairs and stared at our plates in terror. Dad dug in. “You will sit here until your plate is clean.” Hours passed. Still we sat. Still dad glared. I think we ate it, but I don’t remember. I just remember The sitting and the staring and the glaring. Years later, dad said, “I sure made some mistakes, and there are some things I wish I could change. I would never have made you girls stay at that table and eat something you didn’t like, for one thing.” His 60-year-old self was now embarrassed by his 23-year-old choices. All I know is his stubbornness, his mistake, made a day I remember in a childhood I have largely forgotten, a bookmark in my story, the clearest picture I have of my boy father. Last night, Nickie made shepherd’s pie. She didn’t know the story. I told her -- smiling, laughing, remembering, I told her. Then I tasted shepherd’s pie for the first time. And then I went back for seconds. © 2020 Deborah E. Moore, All Rights Reserved