Sorrow

Daddy handed me Mama's beige open-weave sweater two weeks after she died. "It's yours if you'll have it." I took the suede handbag and matching pumps I'd helped her pick out at Belks a few years back. The sales clerk special ordered the pumps.

That's about all that was taken out of the house of Mama's. Her clothes still hung from wire hangers. Her pocketbooks were still in the closet in the bathroom along with her pink hair curlers and pajamas. Her lipstick still sat in the holder on the blue tiled bathroom shelf ten years later.

I gave Daddy the only thing I could think to give him on February 11, 1995. I said I'd come on back home and take care of his land. He was dying. I knew he'd never understood why I left. Williams' didn't do that. They stayed where they were brought up.

I quit my job and drove on back home to live in the house where I was raised. The contractor was to start on the house in a couple of weeks. Mama's clothes had not been worn in ten years.

I had somehow managed to lived through the illnessess and deaths of both of my parents. Sifting through their lives - one love letter, one box of instant grits, one get well card, one pair of underwear at a time was another matter that almost woke me from the coma I had willed upon my conscious self.

The garbage bags I bought at the convenience store smelled of old grease. Each time I tore one off I became deathly sick. Thinking I was having some sort of physical reaction to capitulation, to death, to watching my hands rape my parent's home over and over, I poured myself a stiff drink.

It was later at my sister's house that I began to recognize the symptoms. The sausage on the platter would never pass my lips. I pulled my biscuit through the syrup over and over. I was pregnant.

The remainder of the cleanup would be done without anything to dull the ache. Now my constant companion was a case of morning sickness that lasted until I closed my eyes at night. I packed, threw-up, and then went on to bed. My sister could not bring herself to do what my hands were doing. I understood.

I boxed, bagged, tore down, ripped apart, scattered every momento, every memory, everything that said home. I did this thing with hands so like Mama's. I tore up her housekeeping, pulled out her cabinets, eviscerated her scared spot. I finally threw out the cans she had stored in her special baking section, cans that were now bloated -- cans she touched with a special recipe in mind.

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