2.19 Conversations With God

1956 • San Jose ~ Reading was good company. I read whatever was in front of me. I read all four sides of the milk carton and the Cheerios box and the C&H container. I read the editor’s notes and publication dates and fine print in the front of True Detective and Reader’s Digest and Cornet or whatever Mom left on the table. If I’d finished my last stack of mysteries from the library, I read our new four-inch-thick Webster’s Combined Dictionary and Encyclopedia that Larry gave us for Christmas; I studied the slick colored pictures of the plants and animals in it until I knew them by heart.

When I got bored reading indoors, I went outside and read. Sometimes I’d just lie in the yard in the afternoon sun, warming my face and body, feeling the heat on my cheeks, keeping my eyes closed (no way was I going to go blind looking directly into the sun), dreaming of angels. The long hair on my arms stirred in the breeze; it was the grass and I was the earth. Listening to grasshoppers rasping in my ears, feeling a small brown butterfly kissing my arm with its tiny eyelash feet, I breathed in the loamy odor of dirt and chewed on a long stem of sour grass. I talked to myself and to God as I kept an eye out for the mangy dog next door and the honeybees hovering over the alyssum making sure no bees buzzed under me before I settled down. I‘d been stung before when I was maybe three and we lived in our old two-story house in Sonora. It is my first memory. Running to the store screaming for Dad, he caught me, told me to calm down, pulled the stinger out of my back, and said it was only a bee sting and that I would survive.

I flipped over and dug my elbows and knees and wiggled my toes into the dark cool dirt, scratching my bare legs where the rocks and stickers poked through the Bermuda grass. Beneath my nose I studied an army of black ants scurrying with their top-heavy loads, building cities with tunnels and pyramids. One procession transported a dead roly-poly and dragged a squirming earwig to feed their industrious six-legged troops. I was most careful not to squash them or breathe too hard and wreck their work. I did, however, put a twig in their way to make their lives more interesting. I was pretty sure that wasn’t a sin.

to be continued…

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
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