Nostalgia is a funny thing. I remember vividly the very air of San Antonio, the warm, sweet, almost rotten smell of the river and the jungle, the feel of green clay between my fingers. I remember the taste of ripe guava and the taste of guava not quite ripe but eaten anyway. I remember all the words to ‘Springtime in the Rockies,’ a sentimental song our friend Lohinos played, the light of the kerosene lantern shining on his polished guitar. Everything from the language to the air was new to me, and so I noticed everything, without knowing I noticed it. I learned to see the way I learned Spanish, unaware, and it was in Belize that I learned it.
Now, twenty-two years later, I travel when I can, looking for amazement, for a girl in a blue leotard who seems to have no bones, for plants that wilt at the touch of a finger and then come back to life. Those months in Belize were among the most vivid in my life and I remember them with an ache of longing. But at the time it was a world too raw, too strong for me. And when my mother announced the following year that we were returning to San Antonio, I shook my eight-year-old head and refused to go.
Paola Bilbrough
That spring we lived in Canvastown there were mushrooms the size of dinner plates in the fields, frayed at the gills with lice.
My mother wore a feather in her hair, naked in profile, always painting.
My father, stringy ponytail, pink shirt, threw pots in a cow shed.
I wanted to be the neighbour’s child.
She, fat and breathless, would seat me on top of their enormous freezer, a mortuary of animal carcasses, feed me bright yellow pickle, doughy bread.
The odour of basset hounds, mutton gristle and hot vinyl.
She created nothing, sat indoors eating melted cheese from a dented frying pan.
Furrows on her husband’s brow plowed deep, skin red as raw beef.
He could listen with the trees, make a willow stick dance to the song of an underground stream.
The flick of my mother’s brush on canvas, buzz of mason bees building clay houses, the dull roar of my father’s kiln.
Across the road, the weaver at his loom, weaving a poltergeist’s footfalls into a vermilion carpet.
Sound gradually drinking in all its listeners.
The fat woman and I didn’t listen.
She was bored with the water diviner.
Resplendent in a green chenille housecoat, she turned afternoon into evening by watching Bewitched on TV.
I liked to lie in her overgrown garden, watch crab apples pull malevolent faces from the tree, poke out their wormy tongues at passersby.
Appetites
Sara said her father had been a thief; she remembered other people’s fruit lighting up the bushes, oranges like planets, old sweet apples falling into her father’s flour-bag shirt. She ate nasturtiums, waxy honey. Sugar was forbidden.
Dan would gut Sunday loaves, the colour and texture of kapok. After school, mouth stained green; jelly crystals straight from the packet. Every night chocolate pudding thick and dark as estuary mud flats.
He had a milk run, drank from scratched glass bottles, cream coating his throat when he swallowed.
Sara was allowed goat’s milk, thistle milk, any milk but cow’s. That’s what separated them, she said, his complacent suburban appetites.
She thought of milk from the top of the bottle as she fingered the satin skin of his inside wrist.
Kanji
My father and I slept in a Japanese car case, kanji printed on the wall in place of family portraits.
Nights I lay awake, the black characters assumed flesh.
Clothes rustling as they changed posture.
Every morning a walk through macrocarpa to a household of stained armrests, chapatis and chipped enamel mugs.
Only chopsticks lay in our drawers, Hand-whittled and oiled.
In spring we made elderflower lemonade, white star flowers fizzing to the surface.
The elderflower a witch among trees, its character more disturbing than the kanji on our walls.
A tree whose shadow could make the mind curdle like milk.
In summer, cherry wine: each of us scrubbed calloused heels, crushed fruit in the belly of the bath, feet beating out a warlike rhythm.
A dense, sweet, almost rotten smell. Legs covered with red-black juice, the blood of summer.
Membrane 1
I was a festival child.
Cherry picking season we endured unwashed hair, scant meals.
My father was a puppeteer,
I remember sunken eyes, bruised cheeks, empty glove bodies.
In the front row of Punch and Judy
I held a stranger’s baby, its heartbeat filling the whole head.
The fontanel before the bones knit: a frog’s throat as it swallows.
Dancers knotted up baling twine hair. Rain.
And mud warm between the toes.
Seven-year-old skin gossamer between myself and the world.
In Dublin, your mother cooked Sunday roast, her stretch-suit vivid hydrangea pink.
Your father argued about the Pope over tea. All I knew of Ireland was our plow horse, Connemara.
Membrane 2
Rain, pale Irish skin, the band screaming
‘Insane in the membrane…’
You call me ‘Homegirl’ America spread over you like fake tan.
I want to take your head, smooth it off with impatient thumb.
Later, the sheet curls from a stained mattress. Your bones move apart sounding of a forest.
Trying to sleep in a fluorescent-lit garage, each of us consumed by separate pasts.
Tepee
I wore only a tight necklace, shoes the colour of a rabbit’s inside ear, buttoned over instep.
Sometimes a painted apron with flowers unfurling, spark-eyed heads in profile.
I carried my father’s offerings: pallid, hasty omelets my mother would not touch,
lemon and mint she drank in noisy gulps, painting in the midday sun.
Clay-smudged,
I sat in a manuka tepee.
Voices in my skull, boats bobbing on a river.
When my father left, we made gingerbread people, molasses-dark and crumbling, ate them slowly; an arm or leg, week by week.
I wore my shoes to bed, fell asleep to the noise of hens roosting in the pear tree.
I dreamt my mother was a statue, that I followed her to all the world’s cities, watched her in piazzas,
pigeons pecking grain from her naked shoulders.
Nearby, an old violinist whose music I couldn’t hear.
Rain Grimes
I was born on the kitchen table. A midwife and my dad comprised the entire birthing team. My pacifist, Joni-Mitchell-singing, vegetarian-to-the-core, ‘who needs shampoo?’ parents did not even briefly consider the sterile experience of a hospital birth. When I finally let go of the embarrassment of that beginning enough to admit it to people, the story always elicited the same response: a wrinkle of the nose and the inevitable question ‘And you still ate on the table?’ It was a glorious moment for my parents, that Octo-.ber day in 1972, when they gave birth to their very own flower child. That kitchen table stood in a tiny cabin with no bathroom in rural Pennsylvania. My parents were both twenty-five and growing most of their own food, raising goats and making their own dairy products. I slept with my parents until I was five, drank goat’s milk and peed in an outhouse, blissfully unaware that the rest of the country didn’t live that way. Every photo of me shows a naked girl-child, sometimes with diaper, sometimes without, smudged with dirt and smiling like crazy. There are photos of me naked in tire swings, naked and spread-eagle in old stuffed chairs, naked and sitting on the dirty floor of our little house. One baby photo in particular was so embarrassing later that I went to great pains to hide it from my friends: I’m sitting on a pile of hay, one of my ears pierced, my smiling face exceptionally dirty, my hair a victim to home haircuts, and my cloth diaper so full it’s falling off my body. No pink velvet dresses and K-Mart balloon backdrops for my family.