Muriel's Page
I've long had a dream of having a piece of my writing published. It finally happened! "Tingling" was just published at pinkleypress.com. Hope you like it.
Tingling
As dusk turns to dark, I dig out my husband’s rumpled old raincoat from the back of the front closet and put it on. It covers me from throat to ankle. Into the left pocket, I stuff the fireplace matches with a lighting strip on the box that I have tested and found to be still good. In the right is my iPhone, fully charged. It will serve as a flashlight if needed and a means to call the fire department when the deed is done. Ed’s white tennis cap with its low, circular brim goes on next. My hands, encased in mismatched garden gloves, hold the metal handle of a half-full jug of kerosene. I know Ed won’t hear me leave since he is in a deep snore following his early night out with Cliff for a “couple” of beers. I creep out onto our concrete slab front porch. No one is on the street. In our neighborhood of post-WWII homes in various stages of dilapidation, no one ever is at this hour. A dog barks and is answered by mates here and there, but that's normal. No one will take much notice. I turn right, reach the end of my street, turn right at the corner, and turn right again. Reaching the street just behind and parallel to mine, I come to a familiar sight. On one side is a row of houses, and on the other, a scraggly wood that is punctuated in places with empty beer cans, burrito wrappers and torn plastic bags. It blocks the view of a railroad track that runs along a pebbled embankment. One of many local feral cats takes quick note of my presence but scurries across the street into the wood on an escapade of its own. Within minutes, I reach my destination, a darkened house with its backyard separated from my backyard by my six-foot-high wood plank fence. As far as I could make out when I’d passed here during the day, two or three guys rent the place. A motorcycle and beaten down pick-up truck stand in the driveway. Luckily, they don't have a dog. Most likely, they do have a gun. Most people around here do. I shore up my courage and skulk down the driveway to the back of the house, holding the jug close so that it doesn't bump a trashcan or some other unforeseen obstacle. At the very back before my fence there stands my target. A Tingley Elm. The object of my pyromaniac fury. The tree has massive branches reaching up to the sky well beyond the height of any crane that one might encounter at a construction site. These tree limbs are ugly, boxy, and of a non-descript gray/brown, the color of the dust found under a bed. The branches do not form a symmetrical crown. Instead, they stretch over my fence in the shape of a massive waterfall of leaf and limb. The leafy green of this waterfall might look appealing to the uninformed, but to me, it spells dystopian disaster to the plants in my yard. This monster, this dastardly bit of flora, is responsible for the methodical destruction of every tree, herb, bush, grass, and spate of ground-cover that I have ever planted (except for one large yucca, which, I therefore, love). As I look out from my back door each day toward the yard where I now stand, the big tree’s hand-sized leaves sway in my direction signifying to me its utter dismissal of any of my attempts to beautify my land. Its leafy semaphore underscores that it will long outlive any time I have on Earth. Despite wind, poor soil, and the lack of rain of our high desert land, the beast flourishes. By now I imagine its roots reach to the River Styx. I can forebear its boxy, top-heavy appearance and even its iron will to bend itself in the direction of my yard. The quality that makes this thing unbearable is its fecundity. Not content to spawn a few offspring each year, it creates mega-millions of tiny, windblown seeds each spring that propagate wherever they land. These appear everywhere on my property: in flower beds; in herb gardens; in pots, large and small; in grassy swarths; between rocks whether underlain by growth-inhibiting fabric or not. Once a tiny seedling hits dirt, it sends out roots almost simultaneously. Within days, that root is so deep that the buffest of gym nuts cannot pull it free. History notes that it was Clyde Tingley who is responsible for this menace. Tingley, an Ohio transplant, became governor of New Mexico in 1934. He introduced and oversaw the widespread planting of the Siberian Elm. I suppose the purpose was to introduce shade to a place where the sun can overwhelm, but the invasive cure has been far worse than the disease. I tiptoe closer to the trunk. It’s time to unscrew the rusty jug’s top and pour out the combustible fluid. As soon as the flame gets going, I’ll race home and call the fire department. That way I’ll be sure that only the enemy is wounded – and hopefully killed. But in the dark, I look up and through the leaf spaces, notice the moonlight squeezing through them. Looking down around the base of the giant, I see a mosaic of opalescent moonlight and shadow polygons dancing across the hoary roots that snake along the ground before plunging deep into the soil. This soft, pulsating canvas at the foot of the tree is mesmerizing. Then, a soft hoot reaches my ears and the wings of a horned owl open to carry the bird outward from a branch high above my head. I tingle with the mellow dynamism of nature. A deep reverence quenches my stupid rage. “How long will you stand here to filter the light of night and the bright rays of day?” I ask, my palms against bark. Long, I suspect. I turn toward the street and home to bed. August 31, 2013Friends Out ThereApril 28, 2013I have enjoyed glancing through another book club, Booking Mama, and thought you might enjoy it too.
Muthas ...With Mother's Day coming up, our thoughts may drift to the relationships we had with our moms. Living in New Mexico where one in haunted almost daily by images of the sacred mother - Our Lady of Guadalupe - it is hard to escape the prevalent view that the mother-child connection is supposedly one of great joy. I loved my mom, and I'm sure she loved me although my conception occurred at a time when she was engaged to a man other than my father. These facts were never discussed between us, and, in fact, were unknown to me while she was alive. I learned the truth from her sister, who described a scene of her long-time beau arriving at their house to retrieve her hope chest and take it away bouncing it down the back stairs. My mom was the saintly one of the two sisters; her sister, being the wild one. When my mother's mother died when she was 12, my mom became the surrogate mom - and apple of her lonely dad's eye - until he married the quintessential wicked stepmother.
Why all this mother talk? Because I just finished this month's selection - Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter. The book was excellent from cover to cover. I particularly liked what to me was the primary message - that one can overcome the most desperate parent-child relationship and move beyond it to live a full, wholesome, successful life. February 21, 2013
June 11, 2012Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is one of my favorite books. Did you learn in school, as I did, that at one time the feet of Chinese girls were bound tightly so that they would remain small? Wrong! The process was much worse than mere binding. In this novel, this inhumane procedure and the other ordeals women endured in the bound-foot times in China are presented with depth and honesty. The book centers on the relationships among women of that era and the secret female language that helped them to persevere. I do not know any woman who has read this book who has not adored it. Read more about Snow Flower and the Secret Fan at the author's website.
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