Friday, February 17, 2012

Raisin Oranges

My mother and her best friend sat at our kitchen table crying and smiling, watching us children jump and sink like titanic on that lone raft in the pool—we were the sailors, our dog the captain. it was summertime and the sun was hot and heavy, but freeing like the smell of citrus from the orange trees in the backyard. I stood on the cool kitchen tiles looking out, but not looking back. The table was bare with just their hands. My own felt like raisins, pruned from the indian waters, wrung out in nervous predicament. My mother played with my hair, and I told them about my break from this child’s play of the populars, and they laughed over a possible poplar tree, “populars or poplars?” I couldn’t understand how trees had anything to do with being popular. I can’t understand how I thought they had nothing to do with being loved. My pronunciation was no good; I was young and knew I wanted to be neither.

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