By Sunday, I am done with wearing blazers and a wristwatch. Keeping time. Measuring input and output. By Sunday, I am done with screens, calculations and the whole of the number line. By sunday, I am done taking the same flight of stairs up to my office, step after step. Feeling the familiar strain in my thighs, feeling strength in my legs. The ancestor-strength that in another age might have helped me gather tree nuts and roots and travel long distances, with perhaps a child on one hip.
Instead, I use my ancestor-legs to climb the flight of stairs up to my office. Monday, I climb. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I climb. Long distances indeed. But by sunday, I am done with stairs. I put the strange art of language aside. The machinery of articulation and compensation goes quiet. I go to the stove. By sunday, I will make a gumbo. Rather, I will let a gumbo make me.
I will become a woman who sautes onions in butter. Like other women who are done by sunday, I liberate some red wine from a patient bottle of black glass. A bouquet of peppercorn, currant and oak fire perfumes the air. I taste and am suddenly brought into the company of women with strength in their legs who stand at the gumbo pot. I am with the gumbo-women. By now, I’ve forgotten the flight of stairs and let my hands perform the ancient work of stirring. My hands, which look like my mother’s hands. I stir the flour into the hot oil and wonder if she knows our hands are the same. I see her in the kitchen at the gulf, with a hook in her thumb. I stir and stir and wonder if she remembers screaming as it was pulled out. Does she know I heard and that we have the same hands? Does she stir flour into hot oil until it runs rich as the mississippi?
I watch the roux churn by the stirring of my spoon, and I see the red river of my growing up years, the ouachita by which my father worked and died, bayou desierd and how we checked the trot lines after supper, the atchafalaya where i’ve found birds the color of rose quartz, the pontchartrain on the way to the buzzing, sleepless city. By sunday, I churn all my life in this red pot. I stir until the moon comes up high and mighty as a grandmother at church. Whispering to me about the hook in my mother’s hand, the gulf, long distances and sermons I never understood.
My hands do their quiet work, and I listen as the moon lets out its siren song. Pillows of gumbo spirit spiral up from the roux and soar out the window to meet the stars. By sunday, I am done with stairs, so I go too. On my gumbo-flight, I join winter pelicans revolving up into the moonshine. Making a tower of white wings and feathers. By sunday, they have made a opalescent shrine to the delta. I have come to lay garlands of garlic and wine grapes at its feet.
From Pelican Tower, I can see the golden lights coming from miles and miles of kitchen windows where women with strength in their legs let gumbo magic make them. From here, flying with gumbo-wings where english and calculators are of no use, I see the long distance of the mississippi, the midnight dance of sea birds, the short time the coast has left – disappearing as quick as the cook’s wine. By sunday, gumbo has remade me, and I know my hands are my mother’s hands.
Some Other Spring 