Warm-Ups

Gecko

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Lurchi scurried along the windowsill and up the screen behind the slatted window panes until he found a spot where the sun streamed in. I liked to call our geckos after the German shoe company’s mascot, even though I knew they weren’t the same. Jonathan had a whole collection of their comic books with Lurchi the Salamander as the hero who wore leather Salamander shoes and a Fedora on his many missions to save boys and girls from all manner of perils. Giving the geckos this name made them more endearing and helped me pretend they were pets; the best kind of pets, since I didn’t have to feed them or take care of them except to protect them from the children, and yet they served us as a moderate pest control.

I paused for a moment to watch Lurchi-the-gecko-not-salamander as he clung to our fly-wire, eyes closed, heart-rate slowed, soaking in the sun like a solar panel, unperturbed by the clouds of dust that rolled our way after each Personal Motor Vehicle (PMV) roared down the dirt road, nor by the loud and gregarious groups of men, women, and children that passed by our house on the edge of town in an endless stream. Not even the loud raucous that was coming from the direction of Kama Market to our left, which was slowly but steadily drawing nearer, aroused him.

I caught a first glimpse of the excited crowd as they reached the edge of the back side of our garden. Since our living area was one flight up from ground level, I had a good vantage point and could see as far as the first 6 to 6 shacks that lined the road between our house and the neighborhood market even over our two meter high pit-pit “Banis” (fence). It wasn’t unusual to see such a large crowd. Sometimes a mob of between a hundred and two hundred people could run by our house in angry pursuit of someone that allegedly had just made off with an item that didn’t belong to him. “Stopim em! Stopim em! Em giaman, tasol! Em no gut! Kissim em now!” “Stop him! Stop him! He’s a liar and a thief and no good! Get him!” the mob would yell as they stampeded off down the road. Other times there could be a large crowd that had gathered around two women who were really going at each other in the vicious way only women do. One of the women would most likely be a wife from somewhere else who had discovered that her husband had taken another wife here in Goroka. Officially, that kind of thing was now illegal, unofficially, it happened all the time.

But this was not that kind of crowd. It was a fairly large group, but less than a hundred, of mostly men and some women, which built a kind of cosmos around an epicenter of commotion. By the time they had reached the side of our garden which was directly in front of me, Naguru’s curiosity had brought her to my side. As my haus-Meri (maid) and I stood there, we could make out what was going on. In the center of this crowd there was an angry Highlands man who had a woman strong armed in a headlock. In this way they, and the entire cosmos, moved some paces along, he yelling angrily and she wailing and pleading. Then he let her go and tried to move on, only to have her follow him, still loudly wailing and pleading in the most desperate and haunting tones, grabbing him, falling on her knees, throwing dirt on herself, and begging. We could not understand what they were saying since everyone in the crowd was loudly voicing their opinions of who should do what, and that in some mixture of Pidgin and “Tok-ples” (Talk-place, or local language). Then the Highlands man grabbed the woman again in a headlock and began punching her head with his free fist while they turned the corner and moved to a standstill directly in front of my gate.

At this point I had seen enough and moved to go out and try to stop this violence. It would not have been the first time I had intervened in the family affairs of strangers in my host country of Papua New Guinea. Already in the first week we were in Goroka, a city of about 25-30 thousand, before moving into the house designated for us by our mission, the one year old of a young family living on the grounds of our temporary housing had a severe ear infection. When I went to see what the problem was in the middle of the night after the child had been screaming for hours, the young family, who were charismatic Lutherans, told me they were trusting God to heal their child. Thankfully they were able to interpret my intervention with fever reducing pain medicine and a ride to the clinic the next day as an answer to their prayers. Often we would simply stop the car when we passed a child with an obvious ailment, like a huge abscess or an open wound, and politely insist that they let us take the family to the 2 Kina clinic (fifty cent clinic). Once it was necessary to harbor our neighbor who was being assaulted by her adult, mentally handicapped, male relative whom she helped take care of.

On these and many other occasions, my mere being caucasian and the wealth that was associated with it, was all that was necessary to gain invitation, entrance, and compliance. That and the ELC-PNG logo on the side of our car, which signaled that we were Lutheran missionaries and not business people. But I had not yet waded into a physical altercation involving men, though I had witnessed plenty, and in certain heated situations, like bumping into the PKV ahead of me one day while out shopping, I made sure to communicate an exaggerated deference and profuse apologies, so as to avoid escalation, to the driver -who was mostly play-acting at being furious. We both knew that he had hit pay-dirt and would pocket a high compensation price from us.

Now, as this scene unfolded outside of my window, it was just Naguru, myself, our older gardener, Paul, and my two young children at home for the week that my husband was away on a bush tour, but my instincts moved me toward the door anyway. I guess I thought I could slip into a pair of leather Salamander shoes and a Fedora and exorcise the authority I seemed to have as a white woman in PNG, and perhaps as one who had a closer claim on the gate they happened to be standing in front of. But before I could take a third step, Naguru grabbed hold of my arm and, without words, let me know that the color of my skin could not save this woman. I should stay put.

So I did.

The malignant crowd moved up the road toward Donald’s house, the young man who had worked in our garden, looked after Jonathan, and had been an indispensable cultural bridge for us until he started his own gardening business. He was the adopted son of the church’s District President who lived up the street, and the next day I asked him what he knew about the incident. What Naguru and I heard broke our hearts. The husband had suspected and accused the woman of being with someone else and had taken her young child away and given him to his relatives in his village where she would be unable to retrieve him.

As I was taking this all in, I hung my head, and out of the corner of my eye I could see that my daughter, Charis, had crawled across the floor and cornered Lurchi. By the time I could reach her, it was too late. The gecko had darted away along the bookcase, leaving his tail in the tight fist of my delighted one year old.

Shine

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Baskets made in Rongo, Eastern Highlands, PNG
“Basket weaving is a most important work”
I tell myself
It requires this slow deliberation
This meticulous attention to detail
This searing scrutiny
To choose just the right reeds
To pair them just so
This careful handling to bend but not break
To make the weave as tight as can be
To avoid any leakage
To protect what’s inside

I have an impressive stockpile of reeds
Collected over more than half a century
Long reeds, short reeds, 
   fat and brittle, little reeds,
   thin and sharp and pointy reeds
They were the cutting arrows of criticism 
   that once pierced my side
The dull blows of failure,
   that bruised my swollen pride
The feeble first attempts 
   that could not take the heat
And the hollow sound of footsteps 
   from my cowardly retreat

Over the years the cane has collected
   to a high and constraining pile
And though I donn the fruit of this pernicious
   craftsmanship with poise and smiles
I’m often crouched behind this makeshift screen,
   paralyzed, silent, invisible, and mean,

I want one day to let my little light shine
But on and on and on I weave
While still wearing this big basket of mine.

(Shine in 5)

Train

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With her foot up on the heater-baseboard which ran along the wall, and her elbow on her raised knee, she cupped her chin in her hand and stared out of the window. The rain was coming down in sheets now, and if it did not stop within the next two hours, she would surely be drenched by the time she got home. Not that she had forgotten an umbrella. That would never happen. But between her overly large suitcase, her bulging cosmetic bag, her laptop bag, the duffel bag with extra shoes, and the shopping bag with gifts and snacks, she would have no hand free for such a contraption. Over the decades, she had tried to constrain the amount of things she took on such trips, but no amount of inconvenience and hassle with her luggage had been able to cure her of her deeply rooted abandonment issues. “Be Prepared!” was a stain on every fiber of her being.

Now she was simply grateful for this window, literally and figuratively: the bracket of time to herself to shift into neutral and coast along for a couple of hours, as well as the cold, grey, square sheet of glass to lean her head against and be lulled by its monotonous stream of scenery. In the same way the fields and buildings and trees could be seen coming gradually toward her from the distance only to rush by and disappear behind her, so too did the events of the week pass review in her tired brain. Just as grey, just as monotonous.

It was the same old refrain. The weeks of frantic and thorough preparation hadn’t positioned her into a state of confidence, only exposed her to the infinite sea of knowledge, skills, and possibilities that she did not yet master. The closer the deadline came, the tighter the knot in her stomach grew, and the more ant-acids she took before going to bed. The migraines that plagued her on the eve of her presentations now only seemed to come when she addressed an entirely new C suit. Not knowing how high this new bar might be always left her feeling wide open to her darkest opposing line-backer with the number, “Who do you think you are?” The end-zone seemed miles away on such projects, and she felt foolish being on the field at all, let alone thinking she could run the ball, or even score.

But she always did. Though the presentations themselves felt like an out-of-body experience, afterwards, she knew she had slain it. She would hit a homer almost every time. Her clients were pleased. She would be invited back. Business was growing. And yet none of these facts managed to stick to her lapel. They ricocheted off of her like a bird flying into a window, with only a thud and a dead bird to show for it. After some polite conversation with her clients, she would excuse herself and return to her room for some rest before she began the arduous logistics of returning her entire wardrobe and kitchen sink to her place of residence. In that hour or so before she checked out, she would wilt into the hotel bed as all the tension and stress would drain out of her. Then with legs now made of rubber and arms that had become mostly useless appendages, she somehow managed to get all of her luggage into the elevator, then onto the street, down the five blocks to the station, and onto the train.

(in 5)

Hairy (in 3)

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About how I feel.

Ugh! Not this word! It is almost as bad as “moist!” But there it is, so I’ve got no choice but to spend the next 20-30 minutes writing about it. I could go the easy route and fetch up one of the many precarious situations our foster mother had gotten us into. But that would just be an avoidance tactic. I know what this has to be about. I know what needs to be said. And it won’t be pretty. It won’t be fun.

Women are HAIRY!

There! I said it! See where this is going? We grow hair. On our legs. Under our arms. We grow pubic hair. And now, at my age, we even start growing mustaches. It’s nature.

No, I am not completely liberated from the razor. I started shaving my legs and underarms long before the first hair even had a chance, so it is too late to stop now. Somehow we girls absorbed the message pre-puberty that becoming a woman wasn’t so much about the natural process of our bodies growing in certain ways, like hips, boobs, and hair, as it was about being able to use certain products, like bras, pretty underwear, and shaving cream. I cringe to think about how much of my puny allowance and baby-sitting money went to that crap… that and cigarettes!!

And it didn’t end there. Just last week, at my mother-in-law’s celebration, my 24 year old daughter told me I’d better take a tweezer to my upper lip (I had left my epilator at home), so I spent a few painful minutes in the bathroom plucking out the darker fuzz under my nose one at time until it met her approval. “Wer schön sein will, muss leiden!” “To be beautiful, one must suffer,” so the German saying.

But to what new torture has this younger generation acquiesced?! It infuriates me that the porn industry has reached so far into the main culture, that one would be hard pressed to find a woman under, what? 40? 35? Older? Younger? that has any hair at all anywhere on her body but her head. It is not enough that they are selling women string wedgies for the price of a fine bottle of wine, but now the culture is dictating that women masquerade as prepubescent girls for the rest of their lives to appease a pornography, excuse me, a child-pornography saturated male (and female?) population. Only children well under the age of consent have no pubic hair. Growing pubic hair is what happens when you grow into an ADULT. What does that say about those that are holding this up as the new bar of beauty sex-appeal for women to order their lives around?

Obviously I am not writing an expose with any facts, statistics, or personal profiles in the half hour I give myself to write my warm ups. And of course, I’ve not seen any of this for myself. But just knowing that women are going along with this is enough for me to tear my hair out!

Compost

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Managing my kitchen, the influx of groceries and the outflow of meals, has never been my strong suit. It’s my job. I do it. But it’s a chore. The longer I am in my kitchen, the nastier I get. Every day I wait as long as I possibly can to even enter the kitchen, and then I try to come up with the meal that will take the least amount of prep time, cause the least amount of mess to clean up, with the ingredients I happen to have on hand.

It is like an Escape Room challenge, “how to get out of this room before Mommy Dearest emerges and traumatizes my children?”

Shopping is a matter of making sure I have the basic building blocks for all of the kinds of meals I might want to make. Multiply this by the fluctuating and spontaneous number of mouths I might be feeding on any given night, you come up with a not too tiny sum of perishables that get thrown out in any given year.

And each one of those trips from the fridge to the garbage bin weighs heavily on my conscience! I’ve taken to saying a little prayer of repentance each time I throw out a rotten cucumber or a moldy tomato. “Lord, forgive me for I have sinned against you and your bountiful provisions!” Those leftovers that have been in the fridge longer than anyone can remember? They travel “The guilt-avoidance-underground.” First stop is offering them to my husband to eat. If he passes, they are doomed for the bin, but not before they do their time on the counter waiting for me to summon the courage to actually commit the crime. All the while, I pretend I’m weighing my options. The condements and products that have expired in the fridge or pantry are not a problem at all. I just completely avoid them until my college girls come home and toss them for me.

But for the past year, my conscience has been much lighter. This is not solely because I am only cooking a few times a week for just the two of us now, and thus might have less that goes to waste.

No, it is because I have discovered the secret to life itself!

I grew up in the inner-city. Everything went into one bin, back then, in DC. Plastic, paper, cans, glass, old shoes, sanitary napkins, banana peels. We didn’t have a garbage disposal and we didn’t have a garden, just a back lot with a lot of junk on it. That all changed when I moved to Germany thirty something years ago. When we first married, we lived in a town where we had to even separate out a few different kinds of plastic in addition to the paper, metal, organics, brown glass, green glass, black glass, and clear glass. We had one whole room in the cellar full of boxes for sorting and collecting these different items of trash, and every Saturday morning we would take them to the dump. Thankfully here in Augsburg, the city isn’t so particular about plastic. We have four large garbage bins, brown, green, yellow, black. Organic, paper, plastic & metals, and the rest. We have to bring our glass to a large sorting container on the corner. All very doable.

But having a large brown bin for organic “waste” is not the same thing as actually doing compost, as I have recently found out. Though for the last twenty years, we have lived in a home with a rather large garden for being in a European city, we have only started composting about a year ago. I still don’t know heaps about it or gardening, slow learner that I am, but composting has taught me something pretty essential to life, something I only actually knew in a bookish way. A proverbial truth that I might have even glibly offered to others as a comfort, all while still carrying the burdens a deeper understanding of this truth could have lifted from me.

Nothing is wasted!

It is really true. If it grows, it sows.

My (organic) trash is my garden’s treasure!

Actually seeing this process of egg shells and rotten apples and wilted brown iceberg being turned into soil right in my own yard is a revelation.

There is no garbage in nature.

There is nothing organic that is unusable.

There is no ‘expires-by’ date on plants for being able to replenish the soil.

Just because I can’t or won’t eat it, does not mean I have denied it some fundamental purpose or removed it from the cycle of life. One way or another, my two-month old zucchini will go the way of all living things: From dust to dust.

What a relief this has been. I’m not saying I now think I can let my vegetable drawer become a greenhouse for fungus, or that I can flush left-overs with impunity. I try to do right by the contents of my refrigerator. I do try!

But at the most, it is a sin against my own wallet when I fail, and not a sin against Mother Nature herself. She graciously accepts my slimy, smelly, green and brown gifts, and with willing and industrious hands, she folds them back into herself.

In return, she gives me color, flavor, sweetness, fiber, vitamins, air and beauty.

I give her death, and she gives me life.

Nothing wasted.

Prompt: Iron

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Those creases were so sharp they could almost cut you. We wouldn’t leave the house without them, that stiff, crisp line right down the front of our jeans. Right out of the laundry and hot off the press, that is how it had to be. The older the jeans, the lighter the crease. We may not have always had time to shower, and make up in our day was so paired down, it could be done on the move if need be: black eyeliner heated over a lighter-flame and poked in between our lids and quick left and right motion, swipe of the finger across grey eyeshadow and onto our lids, two quick strokes with the blush-brush, and tinted lip-gloss. Voila. Ok, sometimes there was that god-awful zit that needed coverup and powder, but we had the whole procedure trimmed down to a Formula 1 pit-stop. But the pants? There was no shortcut for the crease and no occasion when it wasn’t mandatory. I couldn’t tell you if it was an ‘80’s thing or just a DC ghetto thing, but it was a thing.

Until it wasn’t anymore. Eventually I traded in my creased jeans for mini skirts, or hippy skirts, or cut offs, or just creaseless jeans.

What did we think those creases would give us? What did we think would happen if we were caught without one? Did we think we could validate our right to exist in this world, add more value to our net worth, or would somehow form deep and meaningful connections only when we had a crease in our pants? How quickly and easily we women are fooled out of our birthright. Through the years I have traded it away for so many stupid and inconsequential things, but none so absurd as when my best friend and I handed it over for an iron.

Prompt: Stormy Winds

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Sometimes it was like a gentle breeze. And just like that, she would put herself right in the middle of it, close her eyes, and let it wash over her, caress her thirsty skin, her thirsty soul. In these soft moments, she would turn toward it and let every inch of her face be kissed. Then she would soften too. She liked it when she could be soft.

Other times, it was like nothing. Like sitting in a motorless sailboat on the Chesapeake, dead in the water. Sails hanging like a fickle and wilted Hydrangea. Nothing. Just hotness. Just a visible shoreline with no movement toward it. Just sitting there in your own little boat with nothing but yourself and your boat, and all the things still not done. Pitiful.

Other times it was like a whole lot’a somethin’. Too much somethin’. Like it was on steroids, whipping everything up, setting everything in commotion. Not a far cry from those stormy winds that got up to terrifying and chasing the fall leaves around the garden. Those times it was like trying to catch a hurricane in a shot glass. Those times she could get just a glimpse of how much more of everything there was, and it was frightening. Those times she thought it better just to shut the hell up.

And sometimes… sometimes, it was amazing. It would come in strong, like it had purpose or something, and those sails would be up, just as strong and determined, pulled in taut and razor sharp. Then things would get going! Hold on! They would fly over those choppy circumstances! Those times made her feel like the queen of the Regatta! It didn’t happen much any more, but that’s what she was always hoping for…

Yeah, it’s about like that

with her and God

Sometimes

Prompt: Sisters

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They are more than sisters, they are friends. Not inseparable, not exclusive, but they enjoy each other, trust each other more than anyone else, and love each other deeply. They go “into town” together, code for hitting the shops, going to a cafe, meeting some friends. Or in summer, they go to the lake with their books, bikinis, a pick-nick, and their phones of course. When they come home for a couple of days or a week, they cook together, wear each other’s clothes, stay up late to watch a movie together, and share a room, though there are enough for everyone to have their own. All the while they are catching each other up on their lives in their respective cities, the college roommates in their apartments, the intrigues in class, their fears and frustrations about their own performance, their romances. There is lots of laughter and silliness when they are together.They have the same humor and get each other. They celebrate each other in grand style on birthdays, their successes, or special occasions, are in constant communication, and yet visit each other whenever possible. Unconsciously, throughout their lives, they have been stitching ever more strands of connection with each other, and these have, over time, turned into strong chords of love and trust and goodness. These chords are all the more secure, because they know that they are much more than best friends. They are sisters.

Prompt: Heimweh (Homesick)

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It is more than an eye sore. It is an affront. Skinny, flat-steal grey, it protrudes above all the actual growing things in the garden. It is not even behind her house. It is behind my house. Right behind it. It stares me down when I am in my dining room. It stares me down when I am in my living room. It towers over the hedge that separates my garden from hers and taunts me. Usually it is bare. Actually, for the past ten years since her husband died, it has prevailed in naked memorial. But now, the faded, gold, red, and black cloth is swaying from it once again, saluting this nations team during the European Soccer Cup. There it hangs, directly in my sights. I cannot ignore it, and I cannot make it go away.

On rare occasions, though, when I am out on the patio and there is a light breeze, I can close my eyes and listen for it. And it has happened that the metal cross bar, to which the flag is fixed, clinks up against the metal flag mast and sounds just like the rigging on a boat bobbing in a harbor. When that happens, I am not homesick. For that fleeting moment, I am home.

Prompt: Jungle

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Photo by Nothing Ahead on Pexels.com

She sat down at her desk and turned her computer on. While it was booting up, she made her way inside to see if she could fetch something useful. She always tread carefully, slowly, timidly. There was so much laying around, stacks upon stacks. There were creaky floor boards, and many holes where she had fallen through before and now paid extra attention to avoid. The place was covered in cob-webs and unruly vines criss-crossing and barring her way forward. As soon as she blew dust off of one stack to pick up an idea, another stack would catch her eye and divert her attention. Each one claiming to have been there longer or promising to be more interesting, or for other reasons more deserving of their day in the sun.

Whenever she did manage to pick one up, put it under her arm, and head for the exit, she would always be stopped by two intimidating figures who would interrogate her choice in the most alarming and disrespectful way. And it always happened that she would doubt her choice, lay the idea on a nearby stack, and make her way deeper and deeper into this cognitive over-growth, hoping, without any reason to hope, that one day she would find The Jewel. That one idea that would magically, effortlessly write itself. The Jewel that would be easily waved through by the sentinels at the door and be received by the entire world, without a single exception, with profound critical acclaim. But today was not that day. There was no such Jewel in sight. So, having spent considerable time rummaging around, she felt she had made a concerted effort, done the best she could to tidy-up the jungle in her head, and made her way back out; again empty handed. Exhausted, she turned the computer off and went shopping.