Honey Defies Physics

Honey defies physics. But it’s not just honey; it’s syrup and sorghum too. For that matter it is anything sticky and edible that a body might wish to keep contained in its container. Just last night I got so aggravated at the honey jar I would have thrown it against the wall….but it was sticking to my fingers.

 It was all sticky on the outside, and it had left its sticky circular foot print on the shelf, and it stuck all over my fingers, and I can’t stand sticky fingers. I ran the hot water and rinsed the outside of the jar off and swabbed off the shelf with a wet rag. Then I got out the “honey spoon” we got somewhere in Arkansas. It’s made out of cherry wood and has a flat end with a honey comb pattern cut in it. It is definitely a cool “spoon.” I dipped it in the honey, twirled the spoon about to keep the sticky goodness in its place and popped it in my mouth. Good stuff. I then rinsed the spoon clean, set the honey jar on the window seal above the sink and went on about my business.

I returned just a little while later for another small smackeral only to find the jar STICKY again and the tell-tale sticky foot print back, but this time on the previously clean window seal. Honey obviously is no respecter of glass. It respects the stupid plastic bear even less. How does it pass through solid materials to the other side and set up shop?

Sorghum does the same thing. There is no pancake syrup that a chubby glass or plastic woman can keep hemmed up for long. Karo has never seen a bottle it could not thwart with its sticky goodness. And chocolate syrup refuses to recognize its place.

Right now in our pantry four containers of sticky edibles have gripped their shelf with sugary toes and have to be wrenched loose in order to be pressed into service. I would clean the shelf, but why bother….. the laws of physics won’t apply this time either. 

Green Rubber Knee Boots

Nothing screamed freedom for me as a kid like green rubber knee boots. Each winter meant new boots for me and my little brother. Sometimes they were Christmas presents, but more often they were simply necessities of two boys who took their job of getting dirty very seriously and whose feet were apparently steeped in fertilizer each night.

Sometimes we would go with our folks to pick them right off the shelf at the store. These generally stood straight and proud on metal shelves with a little forward lean to them giving the boots an air of slightly bowing soldiers ready for service. They came shackled together with a length of thin white cord or perhaps a plastic thread. Depending on the model, they would sport long yellow laces all the way up the front and a strip of yellow rubber around the top. Sometimes we got the plain slip on kind with no laces, but I found that I loved the lace up version better.

I loved threading those laces in and out and in and out and then cinching them down tight at the top to lock the legs of my overalls or jeans in place and make that puffy denim billow at the knee. You couldn’t maintain the billowy effect with the slip on kind, so you couldn’t look like a British soldier for very long with those. The only drawback to the laces was that over time the plastic tip would get worn off and then the laces would fray, then threading them through the eyes got to be a chore, and then the cockleburs would grab hold of the ends and make a spiky wad or maybe the beggar lice would gang up on the ends. Either way pulling the laces back through the eyes required some picking and pulling at the end of the day.

Getting boots at the store was nice, but nothing was better than getting boots in a box and even better was if they were wrapped up. Rubber knee boot boxes are big. They are wide. They can double as a lap desk. And the best ones have the hinged lid and open like a treasure chest. I can still remember several Christmases setting a wonderfully wide box with faint traces of vulcanized rubber seeping through the bright Christmas paper on my lap and waiting for the command for me and my brother to open them together. Of course we knew what was inside. We knew the weight distribution of heavy on both ends but light on the sides meant new boots hiding in the cardboard treasure chest. Sometimes a big sticker with a picture of the boots greeted us from under the shredded Christmas paper. But every time, raising the lid meant that a sweet rush of rubbery goodness filled the air.  Then you had to fold back that sheet of packing  paper and maybe pull the cardboard inserts out before you could try them on. And by all means get the wad of paper out of the toe.

I loved the slick inside. I loved wiggling my toes around all the space in the toe. There was always space in the toe, plenty of space for growing feet. Just had to wear more socks. Then came the requisite walk around the room and up and down the hall, booming along on the wood floor. But best of all was the bang of the back door, the clumping down steps and the heavy, thunderous thunk, thunk, thunking across the yard to the nearest mud hole. And freedom. 

The Power of Place

Grandma Connie died this summer at 102. Truth is I had stayed away from that side of the family, my dad’s side, for a long time. The whole thing was a colossal mess, the classic saga of a shattered American family. Started by teenage passion and destroyed by alcohol fueled immaturity and selfishness. My parents married in their teens and divorced in their twenties. My dad showed up occasionally, made promises with breath heavy with beer, and then left again. A gross, ridiculous, misunderstanding played out with my older brother living with my dad and being raised by my Grandma Connie and Granddaddy Bilbo.  

When we got older, my brother would come pick my younger brother and me up and take us to Grandma Connie’s. All too often my dad showed up drunk, wanted to fight somebody, or worse yet wanted to pull a gun and kill somebody. As the years went by I just had to distance myself from them all.  The trajectory of my life just couldn’t include drunken brawls, unhinged anger, and the violation of every game and fish law on the books. So I just stayed away.

Part of me wishes I hadn’t, primarily because of Grandma. I could sit and listen to her for hours, just sip on that instant coffee she always drank and listen. But during those years I had battles to fight of my own, and my emotional capital just wasn’t sufficient to spend any on gun fights and drunken rants from my father.

Then came the drive down for her funeral. I found myself on back roads passing just barely familiar land marks and grappling with memories welling up from deep down inside, stirring a longing for this place. I am not even sure they could rightly be called memories. They were more like emotionally charged impressions, nothing visually vivid, a series of blurred black and white slides projected on a wobbley screen. More visceral, internal, deeper than memory, more like my very marrow. My genes had their origin in the soil of this Mississippi county, and they longed to be here, to return to their native element. I felt free in my place.

 I am convinced the Bible is right; we are of the soil and the soil of our places matter. They speak to our bones. Two weeks after Grandma Connie’s funeral I was back with my son Caleb, to introduce him to my native soil. We went out to her house at the end of County Road 125, the very end. There was no going beyond Grandma’s house. It was the inevitable destination of County Road 125. 

She had always been a gardener, always growing things. Only now the growing things were left behind all round her house, but as if in some last, wildly fertile good-bye the pear trees heavy with fruit bowed their branches to the ground taking on the curve of a weeping willow more than a pear tree. The apples followed the pears' example. My son and I walked around the house amazed at the bounty, pears, apples, grapes and figs. Tomatoes in the vegetable patch flushed varying hues of red like mottled cheeked mourners, spent and aggravated by too many tears. The place seemed to salute her years of stewardship and mourn her passing at the same time.

I mourned too. I lamented the time I could have spent sitting with her taking in her wisdom. I mourned the relationship my children had missed. I missed my history. I missed the place. But now at least my bones could hear again.