<![CDATA[My Site - Blog]]>Mon, 01 Dec 2025 04:31:51 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[Cotton Candy]]>Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:00:28 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/cotton-candyPicture
Before Daddy died all he could eat was cotton candy. Every day after school for the last week of his life, I'd ride my bike two miles over to the Walmart in Cleburne, buy the pink and purple sugar-coated air and ride two miles home surrounded by hot, sticky plastic bags of spun sugar that drew every fly and mosquito in Johnson County, Texas, all the while hoping he'd still be alive when I got home. 
            When Billy, the guy at the food counter, saw me coming, he'd say, "Here comes my cotton candy girl." I hated going in there. I think he had it in his mind that because I bought cotton candy every day, I was coming in to see him. He'd say stuff like, "No wonder you're so sweet, eating all that cotton candy." And I wanted to scream at him, "It's for Daddy, you moron. He can't eat anything else!"  But instead, I'd say, "Don't you have a girl friend," or something stupid like that. And he'd say, "Just waiting for you to grow up, sugar."
            Three days before Daddy died, I told my brother John that I just couldn't go back in there. "Tell him the truth, Laurel," John said, "and he'll probably leave you alone."
            I never did tell the clerk about Daddy.  It was hard enough just knowing it without having to explain to strangers that Daddy was back at the house dying. But I think John must have stopped by on his way home from the stockyards where he had a job shoveling manure and said something to him because the next time I went in there Billy just smiled at me and handed me three bags of cotton candy.
            On the day of our final exams, I got up extra early to give Daddy a manicure. Daddy always liked to keep a neat appearance, and when he died I was sitting on his bed with him, filing his nails.  First his breathing got slower and slower and then stopped for a while. Then he started breathing sort of normally again. Then time between stopping and starting got longer and longer. We had been told that this was a sign. We had been told that with the narcotic patch he would not suffer. Suffering or no suffering, death was coming for Daddy.
            In one of the counseling sessions with the hospice worker, we had pretended that we were all in the room when Daddy died. At Daddy's pretend death, I reached for Mama's hand when she started praying, and John started singing Daddy's favorite song, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," making his voice sound as much like Willie Nelson's as he could. At Daddy's real death, I screamed so long and so hard that my throat was raw for days after.
            John heard me screaming and came running out of the bathroom, still wet from his shower with his undershorts stuck to him and wearing a Dallas Mavericks t-shirt two sizes too small. Daddy had bought it for him at an exhibition game last year when he still felt good enough to go places. "He's dying," I screamed. "Daddy's dying!" Later John told that all the time I was screaming and crying, I was still filing away on Daddy's nails. John punched the hospice worker's number into the phone and then ran to get Iz.
            Iz is Isabella, my Mama's grandmother. She raised Mama right down the road from where we live now. Iz came running—curlers in her hair, bathrobe flying. She climbed onto the bed next to Daddy and pulled him into her arms like he was a baby, and then she started praying the Our Father in Spanish, the way he liked to hear it, and didn't stop until he was dead.
 
On the day Daddy decided to end his treatment, the doctor at the dialysis center put a narcotic patch on his arm and sent him home. "I guess we won't be needing anymore of this, will we," Daddy said in a whisper when he saw that I was using the last of the shampoo, the kind that smells like dried up flowers, to wash his hair. I just shook my head because I was afraid if I said anything Daddy could hear that I was crying. I tried hard to keep back my tears. Most of them went right down the drain with the flowery suds that rolled off Daddy's head. By the time he died, his head had gotten so small and light that it was like scrubbing a puppy's scalp or a little baby doll's. 
            The next morning, right before Daddy died, Mama saw the empty shampoo bottle on the little beautician's sink that Daddy's twin sister, Aunt Jillie, had installed for him at Christmas when he got too weak to wash his hair in the shower. "Daddy's out of shampoo," Mama said in that way she has of yelling without raising her voice. "He needs more shampoo." John offered to go get it, but Mama didn't want us to be late for our exams. Driving fast into Cleburne for shampoo on the morning Daddy died was probably the first time in a week that Mama had left the house. When she got back, she saw the hospice worker's car in the driveway and came running into the room with a look on her face that I've been trying to forget ever since. She kept saying over and over, "I just went to get his shampoo. You know Lonny, his hair never smelled like anything but a wreath of flowers."
            And then she made us go to school.  She said Daddy wouldn't want us to miss our final exams. But we knew that she wanted us out of the house. When we left Iz was talking to Mama in whispers of Spanish, a language Mama hardly understands anymore and we never learned. Daddy didn't speak it at all because his family is white, but he loved to listen to it, especially Iz's prayers. Then Mama made Iz leave too, and I think she is still a little mad about that. Iz wanted to be with Daddy until they took him away. But Mama told me that she needed to be alone in the house with Daddy one last time, and she didn't want us kids or Iz to be there when the van came for his body.
            We didn't do so good on our exams, but our teachers all understood and gave us make-ups. The whole time I was trying to think about Peru's major exports, I kept hearing Daddy's voice.
            "Laurel," he told me the night before he died when I begged him to go back on dialysis, "nothing is going to keep me alive now. Not dialysis. Not cotton candy."  He squeezed my warm hand in his cold shrunken one and looked at me with his green eyes tired of pain.
            After Daddy died it seemed that everyone thought they knew what he would have wanted. People were always telling us to do things because Daddy would have wanted it that way. We knew all along it was mostly the way they wanted things. John tried to tell Mama that Daddy would have wanted him to quit his job shoveling manure in the hot summer sun, but Mama was pretty sure that was not what Daddy would have wanted.
            And when I announced that I didn't want to go to cheerleading camp, Aunt Jillie said I should go because Daddy would have wanted it that way. Maybe. But I know for sure it was what Aunt Jillie wanted. She had been a cheerleader herself all through high school and even into college, and I think she saw me following in her footsteps. For the whole month before Daddy died Aunt Jillie drove up from Waco on the weekends just to help me practice my moves and yells. Mama would help Daddy out into the yard and he'd clap and whistle when we did especially high jumps and neat perfect splits. Even though Aunt Jillie is forty, she can still turn a beautiful cartwheel.          
When tryout time came, John promised that all his friends would vote for me, and so even though I was terrified I did it, and I got elected. It wasn’t until we were cheering out in front of Walmart where we were raffling off a CD player to raise money for cheerleading camp that I discovered that cheerleading is kind of humiliating. When Aunt Jillie and I had cheered together, it was like a game that Daddy could play, too. And when I tried out in front of the whole school, I was so scared that I didn't even know where my body was. But when Billy stood outside the Walmart and blew me a kiss while I was doing my best split jump, my short skirt flying up over my back, I was embarrassed. "Must be some kind of moron, a grown man flirting with a fourteen-year-old girl." That's what Daddy had said when I told him about Billy bugging me at the food counter. He told me to stay away from Billy.
            Right now there's lots of people I'd like to stay away from. One of them is Pinkie Eppes who I ended up rooming with for five days at cheerleading camp. Before Daddy died, she told everyone he had AIDS. When I told Mama that Pinkie was spreading rumors about Daddy having AIDS she got real mad like I had been the one to say it. "Laurel," she said, "this town has about 500 people in it. Every one of them knows your Daddy and knows he's been going into Cleburne for dialysis three times a week for the last six years. They know that he doesn't have AIDS." And then she calmed down and talked with the voice she used on her rudest customers at the Department of Motor Vehicles. "Even if he did, he would still be your Daddy, and we would love him and take care of him right here at home like we're doing now." She was saying that so I would know not to gossip about people even if they did have AIDS, which I already knew anyway.
            Right after that Pinkie Eppes started acting like she was my best friend. I think Mama must have had a talk with Pinkie's mother, Brenda Sue Eppes, who she has known all her life but who makes her uncomfortable because now she has so much money. She married some son of an oil man who buys ranches, raises emus, and uses Mopeds for roundups. The NBC news even came out here and did a story on the Eppes' ranch once. I remember watching it with Daddy. He said, "That's what Texans who have more money than brains spend their time on." He didn't have much respect for Danny Eppes, partly because of his crazy livestock and the Mopeds, but mostly because he named his only daughter Pinkerton. "Pinkerton Eppes," he said one time when I was talking to him about Pinkie's gossip, "you name a girl Pinkerton and try to make it better by calling her Pinkie and what kind of kid do you expect to get?"  It got so that I couldn't mention her name without Daddy saying, "Laurel, you want to work my nerves, just start talking about that Pinkie."
            I did talk to Daddy about other things, though. When I got home from school, he'd sit up in his bed and I'd help him eat oatmeal or cups of applesauce, and later when he couldn't eat even that, I'd pull little balls of cotton candy that felt like hair with too much mousse on it out of the bag and hand it to him a mouthful at a time. He’d relax and ask me questions about school and how my day had gone. Sometimes when he wasn't having a good day, I think he got me confused with Aunt Jillie. He’d talk about an old dog and the farm they grew up on in New Mexico.
            When I told Aunt Jillie that I didn't want to share a room with Pinkie, she offered to drive over from Waco to the university at San Marcos where the camp was being held and room with me. As much as I love Aunt Jillie, I couldn't think of anything more humiliating than having my aunt come babysit me at cheerleading camp. Plus, she's so depressed about Daddy that she can't go for long without crying.
            She called Mama the other day to tell her she had finally slept through the night and didn't cry all day. When she hung up the phone, Mama said, "Next thing Aunt Jillie'll be telling me that she went potty all by herself!" We laughed, but we were kind of embarrassed, too, because we have been acting pretty strange ourselves. Late at night Mama sometimes crawls into my little twin bed and sleeps beside me until the sun comes up, and then she tiptoes away, maybe thinking I don't notice when I spend the night smashed up against the wall. One afternoon when I got home from school I heard Iz singing Spanish songs in Daddy's smokehouse. When no one's home, I sit in Daddy's LaZeeBoy recliner so I can smell his soap and the grease from his pickup. The night before Mama and John drove me to cheerleading camp I got up about 3 a.m., which used to be one of Daddy's medication times, and saw a light in the kitchen. From the hallway I could see John sitting in Daddy's place at the head of the table. He had on an old workshirt that Daddy used to wear when he drove the backhoe for Franklin Machinery. It floated around John like a cape. Before Daddy got so sick, he had been a big man.   
            Aunt Jillie didn't come to cheerleading camp with me, but when I got there, she called to tell me that she had been having a vision of Daddy as a little boy, playing with Ring, a dog he named that because he was all black except for the white collar of fur around his neck. I have seen snapshots of Daddy and Aunt Jillie playing with Ring in the big field of alfalfa in front of the farmhouse where they grew up. Aunt Jillie said, "Lonny would take off out into that field of deep green with Ring gripping the sleeve of his jacket in his teeth and they'd be gone til dinner time."  That's how she was seeing Daddy—as a little boy in a bluejean jacket walking across a deep field of alfalfa with his dog holding onto his sleeve, a little boy with his back to the window where she stands watching him walk away. She said this vision of him was one she had carried in her mind ever since she was a little girl. All the time I was at cheerleading camp, I kept dreaming of my little boy Daddy swimming away with his dog through a deep green sea.
            While we were at cheerleading camp, Pinkie took it upon herself to look after me. Whenever she decided the other girls were laughing too much and being too loud, Pinkie would get a real serious look on her face that is not quite pretty but real made-up and say, "You know, Laurel's father just died. She needs quiet now." The truth is that I liked hearing them gossip and laugh. I probably would have joined in except that right before Daddy died, he kept asking me about cheerleading camp like I had already been there. Being there, I'd get confused and feel like I was living in his mixed-up idea of time. Once when we got third place in a yell rally, I thought about calling Daddy and telling him. Then I thought I had already told him. And then I called Mama and told her my throat was sore from cheering. We cried for a while before I hung up.
            One night our cheerleading sponsor—who is my Geography teacher who did not make me take another test on the exports of Peru—took us out to a park on the banks of the San Marcos River where there was a little carnival. Girls were going on the Ferris wheel and the Tilt-A-Whirl and sometimes being silly and driving the little kid cars and boats. The night air was so hot it could have been day. Cicadas were calling, and along the banks of the river where it wasn't lit up by carnival lights, fireflies flitted back and forth in the trees. I walked along the river by myself and came to a booth where an old woman was spinning cotton candy around a metal tub. For a long time I just watched people come and go as she spun batch after batch of pink cotton.
            When I started to leave, the old woman gave me some of her cotton candy on a paper cone, not squashed into a bag like the kind from Walmart. I walked over to the river and sat down between the roots of a large cottonwood tree. I breathed in the scent of hot sugar and remembered the sweet smell of Daddy's breath before he died.
            Aunt Jillie tells me that some day I will not mark all time with the death of my father. That time has not come. The time I am living in now is like the picture Aunt Jillie has of Daddy walking with Ring in a field of alfalfa. I live in a vision of myself without him. Sometimes I try to think about what I will be like in the future. When I imagine myself a grown woman, a mother, telling my little girl about the summer I went to cheerleading camp, I can only begin my story one way. Before my Daddy died, all he could eat was cotton candy.

First published in Concho River Review, Fall 1999; anthologized in Concho River Review: Fifteen Years of Fiction,  (Fort Concho Museum Press, 2002)
 
]]><![CDATA[the sea turtle dress]]>Tue, 23 Sep 2025 14:38:19 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/september-23rd-2025The woman in a uniform like a man’s except with a skirt parked her car as close to the steps of a small wooden house as she could. There was no driveway or yard or sidewalk to indicate how to come and go. She got Laurie’s suitcase out of the trunk of her car and held the little girl’s hand as they walked up to the front door. The woman in the uniform had to knock twice, and when a tall woman opened the door, she said, “Estelle Bow Kerchee?”

Estelle opened the door, took Laurie’s suitcase from the woman, and motioned for the little girl to enter. Laurie crossed the threshold. When the woman in uniform stepped forward, too, Estelle said, “Not you.”

“Ma’m, until I leave this little girl, I am responsible for her.” She smelled whiskey on Estelle’s breath. “Have you been drinking?”

“Soldiers from the federal government of the United States of America take Indian children away. You return one. You leavin’ her or not?” Estelle stood firm and blocked the woman’s entry.

Laurie let go of the soldier woman’s hand. She didn’t know her, but the old one was her grandmother. The woman who drove her to Estelle was doing her job.
 
Laurie’s mother, whose name was Catrina, had explained jobs to Laurie so she would understand why her mother spent so much time at the old man’s house and why she could swim in his pool but Laurie couldn’t. Grandmother wasn’t a job. She knew because she sometimes went with Ani to her grandmother’s house. A grandmother was like a mother but old.

Uniforms were for work. Catrina wore a white nurse’s uniform. When she wasn’t working, she wore dresses that she sewed from bright fabrics printed with shells or purple flowers or green sea turtles. Sometimes she made Laurie dresses that matched.

Ani’s mother wore a uniform when she worked and so did Kaipo’s father. They cooked food and cleaned the house and drove cars and did other things on the pineapple plantation owned by the man Catrina took care of.

Catrina’s boyfriend whose name was Carlo wore a uniform and worked on a ship called Oklahoma.
 
Before the bombs fell, Laurie and Catrina and the families of Ani and Kaipo lived together on the pineapple plantation not far from Ewa where Laurie and Ani and Kaipo went to school. Their small bungalow looked like all the other bungalows on the plantation except for the different pots of flowers and plants that grew on porches and in front yards.

On days they weren’t in school and most days after school, Laurie and Ani and Kaipo carried food and teacups and dolls and trucks to the house they made for themselves in the hala thicket. Sometimes Ani’s mother brought them ginger lemonade. Ani and Kaipo were Hawaiians. Natives, explained Ani’s mother.

Laurie thought she might be native, too, because her hair was dark and straight and her skin was browner than Ani’s but lighter than Kaipo’s. Catrina explained that she was native but to a different place. She said they were probably the only Comanche on Oahu. Laurie couldn’t remember living anywhere else, but Catrina said she was born in a place called Oklahoma.
 
The only Oklahoma Laurie knew about was in the ocean.
She believed this was where she was born.
She also knew that wasn’t true.
What was true: Catrina died driving back from the hospital where she worked nights to make extra money because she wanted to cross more ocean and live in Australia. She was killed by bombs.
 
When Laurie rode in the car with the woman in uniform this is what she was thinking about: her mother and Carlo dying from the bombs dropped in the ocean that filled the sky with burning things. Laurie had heard airplanes in the sky before but not so many all at once. Seeds from the monkey pod trees and petals from the yellow hibiscus pelted the old man’s swimming pool. Sometimes Kaipo helped his father skim the pool with the little net at the end of a long pole. The plantation pool was only for the old man and Catrina who helped him exercise with her hands underneath his back and beneath his head. Usually, the pool was flat and shiny like a blue window.
From the car window everything looked flat and brown. Slender white crescents of snow sat like clouds in the purple shadows along the highway. Bare trees clawed at a sky that was blue like the one in Hawai’i.

On the nights Catrina worked, Laurie stayed with Ani or Kaipo. And some nights they stayed at her house. During the day they went in and out of each other’s houses eating and playing and sometimes sleeping like they all lived together. On the day the sky was quiet again and no one could find Catrina, Laurie stayed with Kaipo’s family and Ani’s family came to visit. She heard them say that the Navy could help because sometimes Catrina worked at their hospital. People in uniforms came and looked through the house for papers while Ani’s mother tried not to cry but cried anyway. She put things in Laurie’s suitcase. She told Laurie to choose one of Catrina’s dresses. Laurie chose the one covered in green turtles from the laundry basket because it had not been washed and she could breathe in the way her mother smelled after a night out dancing: perfume, lipstick, cigarettes and sweat. Then Kaipo’s father took her to a place where a lot of people, mostly women and children, had suitcases and were crying. Her suitcase was dark brown with a wide maroon stripe down the middle and a plastic handle that turned everything golden like honey when she looked through it.
Later she went on an airplane with a woman who was crying and saying her husband had died on the Oklahoma. Laurie said that was where she was born. The woman ignored her. She had a hard bump on her belly. When Kaipo’s mama had a bump like that it turned into a baby. She started singing the song Kaipo’s mama sang He nane lua ‘ole Ka’u wehi, but it upset the woman, and she screamed at Laurie. Another woman who sat across the aisle said for Laurie to sit by her and take a nap. On the flight across the ocean, Laurie learned how to stay inside herself. 

When the plane descended, Laurie started to scream. She did not want to fall out of the sky. The woman held her and shushed her and spent one night with her in a hotel in Los Angeles. But then someone came to get her. Laurie went in cars and on more airplanes with other people who said they had found her grandmother, Estelle Bow Kerchee, the mother of Catrina Bow Kerchee, on a little chicken farm in New Mexico. They flew with Laurie to Albuquerque and then to a military base not far from where grandmother lived.

When the woman driving the car said to her, “I bet you’ll be glad to see your grandmother,” Laurie said nothing. She didn’t know anything about her grandmother. She didn’t know if she would be glad to see her or not. Her mother always told her to be polite, and she thought her silence might be impolite, but what she wanted to say was shush because she was trying to remember all the things she was going away from. She didn’t want to forget.
 
“Soldiers.” Estelle kicked her door closed behind the woman.
Laurie had never seen shoes like her grandmother wore. They were black and went halfway up her calves. They had pointed toes and designs like red tongues of fire and blue curlicues. In the room was a dark brown sofa and a wooden table with a lamp and a rocking chair. The kitchen had a square table and two chairs. It did not look happy. In Hawai’i Catrina filled their bungalow with plants and wind chimes and big pillows.

“Carlo was a sailor. He did his job on a ship.”
“Carlo?” What this little girl knew about Catrina was all Estelle would ever know about who her daughter became.

“Mommy’s boyfriend.” Catrina had explained about boyfriends. Some children had mothers and fathers. Some had mothers who had boyfriends. Boyfriends weren’t like fathers. They were for mothers, not children. Carlo gave her dolls she never played with and frilly dresses she never wore. When he kissed her, he bent his head quick like a chicken pecking at something in the road. Kaipo’s father scooped him up off the ground and swung him around and held him close in a big tight hug. “Carlo died in Oklahoma. The one in the ocean.”

Estelle looked into Laurie’s green eyes that were Catrina’s and remembered her daughter. So angry. She would do her best not to make this child so angry that she would run away across oceans. She didn’t know if she could make her happy. “Your room is here.” She led Laurie to what used to be her workroom. The cot and small dresser and bedside table with a lamp on it took up almost all the space. “We’ll get you a nice bed. I didn’t have time.” She started to explain that she had gotten the news of Laurie’s impending arrival only a few days ago, along with the news of her daughter’s death. She froze between the story of a daughter leaving and the story of a daughter arriving. She didn’t know how to talk about that. The talking she had already done was more talking than she often did in a whole day. Estelle released Laurie’s hand and put her suitcase on the cot. She bent stiffly and gave her granddaughter a little hug. “You call me Estelle. I will call you Laurie.”
The grimy window in the room let in only a little light from all the big sky. The branches of a bare pecan tree screeched against the glass in a gust of wind, startling Laurie. She clutched Estelle’s arm and found her grandmother’s beadwork. Unfamiliar with a Great Plains color palette, she didn’t see the pattern until she traced it over and over with her finger. Brown like sand. Orange like sunset. Green like seaweed.
“It’s a turtle.”

Estelle removed the bracelet. “Would you like to wear it?” It wasn’t her best work, but it was one of the first good bracelets she’d made. It displayed her signature use of different size beads, making an irregular surface. This had not been an artistic choice. She used what she had on hand. But she liked the effect and began to create it with intention.

Too large, the cuff slipped off Laurie’s hand. “I’ll be careful.”
“We’ll make you one that fits.”

Laurie looked at grandmother, eyes wide. “You can teach me?”
“Yes.” Estelle knew there were a lot of things she could not teach her granddaughter, but beading was something she could. “We’ll get some bigger beads.” Her beads and needles and crochet hooks were too fine and small for a child. She’d stored her bead supplies in the shed to make room for Laurie. They would need a place to work.
“We feed chickens in the morning,” said Estelle as a way of excusing herself from the room. She left the door open when she went into the kitchen, sat at the table, and poured whiskey into a glass.

Laurie closed the door and opened her suitcase. The clothes Ani’s mother packed were only for Hawai’i. Before she left Los Angeles a woman in a uniform gave her the long-sleeved shirt she wore under a heavy brown jumper and the thick gray tights and a coat and socks and shoes, too. Laurie had never worn so many clothes in her life. Getting dressed was like putting on someone she didn’t know. She piled her Hawai’i clothes on the bed. Then she put the suitcase on the floor. It was empty except for the sea turtle dress, which she spread out so that it flowed over the sides. Then she crawled into the suitcase and wrapped her mother’s skirt and sleeves around her and went to sleep.

Estelle heard Laurie close the door. She listened to her granddaughter rustle around in the room. She didn’t know if she should leave her alone in there. Maybe she should help her unpack and put her clothes away. She’d had Catrina, her own little girl, for such a short time and so long ago, she couldn’t remember what children were like. Estelle went into the front room and turned on the radio. She turned it down low so that Laurie didn’t hear the news. She didn’t know how much Laurie understood about what had happened in Hawai’i. Bothered by the quiet, she went to Laurie’s room and knocked softly before she opened the door. When she saw Laurie wrapped up in the dress covered with turtles, she squatted beside the suitcase, covered her face with her hands and wept. Then she lifted the granddaughter out of the suitcase, gently gathering the dress around her, and carried her into her room. She put the child wearing the breezy shape of her mother down on her bed then lay down beside them to sleep in the perfume haze of sea turtles, little girls, and death.

published in Yellow Medicine Review, Fall 2023
Picture
photo: Jane Hammons
]]><![CDATA[Divorcee (1968)]]>Thu, 26 Jan 2023 20:16:36 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/divorcee-1968Our mother springs naked from the tub to answer the phone. Tucking a lone strand of bubbly blonde hair back into her topknot she says Hello to the disappointing salesman pawning waterless cookware. She shoos a buzzing horsefly away from her bare thigh. Forgets about the cookware considers instead the Hawaiian print patio pants displayed in a downtown window and drops the receiver on her bed where the waterless voice sells on. Our mother glides to her desk bathwater dripping wet from neck shoulders breasts. She punches keys on the adding machine until the balance in her checkbook is appealing.
 
In the hallway mirror she checks her appearance and finds herself, too, appealing. She glances out the window. Brown leaf and withered bud droop from her best geranium. Off she goes to the backyard where she plucks the ungrateful foliage from the carefully tended plant, crumbles it between her fingers and sprinkles it around her rock garden where lava mica smooth water-marked sandstone broken bits of Indian pots, decaying deer and cattle bones grow. Her plot is lush with forget-me-not baby’s breath and some kind of creeper.
 
She straightens a canvas deck chair overturned by sudden gusts of wind—in spring they daily flood the air. Crawls into it. Dry now. Baked by the afternoon. Burnished. More golden every year. The sun. The gold. Both feel good. She is not getting older. Old. Closes her eyes but does not sleep she dreams a life outside the back porch rock garden surrounding farmland. A beach perhaps a jungle never a city. A smooth desert billowing wide beyond her reach. Not this rough cholla cactus covered one. Dunes. Bare. She spins around her a misty crystalline cocoon.
 
The fieldhand who sometimes works in the yard opens the back gate, is not surprised to see her there. The woman who naps naked in the dusty canvas chair. She is not startled or afraid. He tips his sweat-stained hat and she stretches like a cat she might even lick a paw. He untangles the old split garden hose and begins to spray the roses. An airy shush upon the tender bush opens buds, tinges color pale. In time she will cut and arrange the full-grown flowers into vases fill the unadorned still wintry spaces of our house with afternoons.
Like this.
 
She is reminded of the hour by the whispering shower upon the roses. Past the rock garden fragrant honeysuckle vine she goes through the backdoor hallway mirror. The waterless man voice gone she puts the receiver on the hook slips back into the tub. Warms the cooled water and waits for the sound of the school bus crashing across the cattle guard. The rattle shakes her out of nakedness out of the dozing woman the fieldhand knows and into the one who dresses for us in her fine young mother clothes.
Picture
Mom holding Johnny, her third child. She was 24 or 25.
(This prose poem was published in 2015 in The Dr T J Eckleburg Review, an online magazine that no longer exists.)
]]><![CDATA[November 30th, 2022]]>Thu, 01 Dec 2022 00:37:31 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/dreaming-in-mink
Picture
Mom c 1955
]]><![CDATA[Elemental]]>Mon, 22 Apr 2019 15:04:21 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/elementalIt was in the last expulsion/explosion (theories differ) that we became OneWith.
Tsunami. Seism. Zud. All matter cast out outcast came back like a gangster on crack.
 
What did it think it was? Who do we think we are?
 
It thinks we think it thinks too.
 
Earth. Water. Air.
 
In the big remix some OneWith got brain matter material/immaterial. Bacteria iron neon moss mercury skunkweed coral reef loam peak plankton.
 
Mutate. Sporulate. Bud. Regenerate.
 
Volatile—we surface UpTop—hydrogen nitrogen ammonia helium.
 
Some OneWith got data datum information. Thermosphere. Mesosphere. Stratosphere.
 
Records exist. Haboob. Typhoon. Derecho.
 
Some OneWith got memory storage story/history. Mumble mutter hum buzz. Kebra Negast Qu’ran Torah Bhagavad Gita Phtagoras Dhammapada Bible Upanishads Tao Te Ching Thelema.
 
Some OneWith got appendage. Flutter slump lurch lunge. Movement surfaces UpperUnder. Plastic upwells. Cleave cap bench bomb.
 
At the core: heartbeats. Nickel iron nickel iron catastrophe/catalyst.
 
Beautiful opportunist.

originally published in Blue Fifth Review Fall 2012

Picture
Salt ponds outside Salt Lake City, Utah (2017)
]]><![CDATA[Some things about austin]]>Mon, 19 Mar 2018 15:02:29 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/some-things-about-austinMaybe because I'm new to Austin, or maybe because I like to think about places and why I'm in a particular place (or not), I do a lot of reading about Austin. And some writing. In light of the recent bombings in Austin, I wanted to just share some of the articles that have recently caught my attention or that I've come across in research. (I would do this on Storify if it weren't closing down . . .)

This one about Cody Wilson, the man who created the 3D gun, undetectable by by metal detectors, is one of the most disturbing: Cody Wilson, Austin's Edgelord Prince. 

"How I Navigate the Overwhelming Whiteness of Austin" by Doyen Oyeniyi discusses the little-discussed segregation of Austin.

The history of Keep Austin Weird, which came about during the rapid explosion in Austin's population, which brought with it, of course, gentrification.

Religion, immigration and the Confederacy: less about Austin than about Texas. But Austin is the state capitol, and so it is the site of enactment and protest.

The Radical Theology that Could Make Freedom of Religion a Thing of the Past (Lt. Gov Dan Patrick an insidious and powerful practitioner)
Austin is a sanctuary city
Hate groups, Nazis and schools
Confederate monuments at the state capitol
and, of course, guns

Like any place, Austin and Texas are more than the sum of their negative parts. And I find much hopeful about how the state is changing. The activism here is mind blowing. Changes here bode well for change in this country. So a bit of that, too. The Resistance Against Donald Trump Begins in Texas by Greg Cesar, the youngest person to be elected to Austin City Council.

Nonetheless, someone is planting bombs in Austin: (as of this writing, the most recent update on the bombings).


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]]><![CDATA[SIGNS OF UTAH]]>Thu, 04 Jan 2018 17:35:26 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/signs-of-utahThe news of Orrin Hatch's retirement and Mitt Romney's possible run for his seat reminded me that I had taken a bunch of photographs while I was in Utah, mostly Salt Lake City, last November. Whether or not Romney runs, I hope that journalists reporting on the race in Utah will be knowledgeable about the state. Currently it is described, as Alabama was during the election of Doug Jones, as the "reddest of red" states. Sure, it's a red state. But it's more than that, as is any state described by it's crayon political color.
Here's an article about the naming of Harvey Milk Blvd, with quotes from locals that give you a good picture of the variety of opinions on the renaming of the street in an important commercial area. The gelato shop (site of Harvey Milk sign) on Harvey Milk Blvd is in a different part of town from the You Are Safe Here sign, which is downtown near Ken Sanders Rare Books. The Joe Hill mural is on the bookstore.
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"Church & State." Explicit statement about the fact (one that infuriates me) that there never has been much separation between the two in this country. And that is, of course, an inescapable fact about the state of Utah and the Mormons--though this sign is not advertising a Mormon church group as far as I could tell. It is near the Central Christian Church building--as the plaque dated 1955 on the red brick notes--but I don't know if it is related to that church either. Or if that building is still even a church. (It was a drive-by shot.)
On the way to the north end of the Great Salt Lake to see the Spiral Jetty, I drove with a friend through the beautiful Logan Valley.
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I was surprised, silly me, that people hunt swan, so I did a little research and came across numerous blogs devoted to the dressing and cooking of the swan (tastes like goose! let's have swan for Thanksgiving!). It is the tundra swan that is legal to hunt in the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, but not in this area, which might be the Salt Creek Waterfowl Management Area of that Refuge. (I couldn't find the exact name of the Public Shooting Grounds Waterfowl Management Area.)

I take lots of pictures of signs: they speak for themselves. And others.


]]><![CDATA[Something I'll do for a while then not]]>Tue, 21 Nov 2017 15:38:10 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/something-ill-do-for-a-while-then-notEvery morning and evening I read a few pages from Teju Cole's remarkable book, Blind Spot. I suspect when I finish it, I'll reread it, probably not page to page but just open it here and there.
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I'm not someone who rereads books or rewatches movies (with the exception of Apocalypse Now and Badlands), though there are plenty of poems I read and reread. And I'm not someone who has much of a daily practice except for making the commitment to spend some part of the day writing and several times a week (once it was daily, now less often) take a photograph. If you are not familiar with Bind Spot, it looks like this.
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 So you can see (literally) why it appeals to me. I don't think anyone has made better use of short pieces of writing than Cole. Here is the opening passage from "Brooklyn" (pictured above). "One of the common uses of the word 'shadow' was as a synonym for 'photograph.' This was the sense in which Sojourner Truth used it when she wrote, on the 1864 photographic postcard bearing her image, 'I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.'"
And just now writing this, I see that shadow behind the photograph (a scan of my grandmother's garden scissors) which inspired the following poem, published by Best Friends Feminist Collective in Albuquerque in the early 70s.

SHEARS
 
Those long silver scissors
            shears you call them
            sit in your kitchen
            like you long your hands long
                        like the shimmer of
                                    vodka
            sliding down your lean throat
 
The garden scissors
            snap the heads
            of roses and mums
            that sit in coffee cans
            in your kitchen
We see them when we visit you
The scissors next to your hand
 
In San Francisco passing over
the Hills Bros. plant
I thought of you
The beach in Carmel
            Waves breaking silver
            I thought of you
In your kitchen
            thinking of me
 
Honeymooning
            your granddaughter
            a bride
            married on your back porch
            surrounded by mums
            and roses
your scissors had been to work
            for me
 
You stayed outside most of that day
            to greet guests
But you longed for the kitchen
            champagne did not satisfy
The silver of the kitchen longed also


What I planned to do:
  • write something about reading Cole
  • take photographs of his book

What I hadn't planned to do:
  • think about shadow
  • post an old poem

Resonance: that is how Blind Spot is working on me. And why, for now, it is so valuable.





]]><![CDATA[Walking in Austin]]>Thu, 07 Sep 2017 17:27:49 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/walking-in-austinFirst: it's possible again! Seventy-five extremely cool degrees and breezy when I left the house this morning at 11:00 a.m. It's been a while: try as I do, it's impossible to enjoy a walk when it's 105 out.

Today I walked in a different direction from my usual treks and to a new neighborhood. I often pass this street designated as green when I'm driving because it's off Oltorf St., which is not a particularly enjoyable street to walk on, at least not in my neighborhood. It intersects with South Congress where there is an old strip mall on one corner, an HEB on the other, and the drive-thru entrance to a bank and a big Catholic church and school across from the HEB. Police often appear to mediate fender benders, and paramedics tend to injured pedestrians and bicycle riders weekly.
But I'd been curious about this street (Forest, I think, in the Dawson neighborhood) and what it means to qualify as a Green Neighborhood in Austin. I'd glanced down it a number of times as I drove past, attracted not just by the sign but also by the large trees and the shade they cast (see above ref to temperatures).

Like many neighborhoods in Austin there are sidewalks on only one side of the street. (In my sister's Crestview neighborhood some of the streets have no sidewalks and streets even wider than this one. In his book The Geography of Nowhere The Rise and Decline of America's Manmade Landscapes, James Kunstler writes that back in the 1950s when suburbs were being designed "the width of residential streets was tied closely to the idea of a probable nuclear war with the Russians. And in the aftermath of a war, it was believed, wide streets would make it easier to clean up the mess with heavy equipment" pp. 112-114). Austin, despite its Walk Score, is not a particularly walkable city. (When I moved here from the Bay Area, I chose this neighborhood because I can, in fact, walk to most everything I need to do and to much of what I want to do.)

In addition to being Green, this street is almost frightfully clean, something I notice because I am in the habit of picking up trash, and there is typically a lot of it on the streets of Austin.
I did come across a full bottle of root beer. It hadn't been opened, so I suspect it was accidentally dropped and not tossed. (Is it still litter?) After picking it up, I attempted to deposit it in a recycling bin at the end of someone's driveway and was chastised for it, so I carried it out of the Green neighborhood and into the parking lot of the HEB where there are plenty of trash cans but no recycling bins. While I did not have a conversation about the ownership of bins with the person in the Green Community, I talk trash frequently with my homeless neighbors (oxymoron?) many of whom sleep in the darker recesses of the strip mall and enjoy the shade of the bus stops along South Congress. I walk a lot, weather permitting, and also frequently ride the bus, so I've gotten to know a number of them. I once had a rather lengthy conversation about whether a single glove was trash or a lost item and was persuaded to leave it on top of the trash can in case someone came back for it. These conversations made me pause as I prepared to toss the unopened bottle of root beer. Was it, after all, trash? Maybe someone would want it? So, as with the glove, I placed it on the flat top of the trash can, leaving it to someone else to decide whether it was food or garbage.
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And then I walked home.
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The end.
]]><![CDATA[Memoir Notes: 2]]>Mon, 04 Sep 2017 16:27:54 GMThttps://www.janehammons.com/blog/memoir-notes-2
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Ghost jewelry. What you can’t see here, because I’ve made it that way, are the colors. Turquoise. Coral. Silver. Her colors. And also red. Earth tones I think of her that way. And black, too, in her last years, like a lot of women aging, she turned to solids. No color. One of the last gifts I gave her was a bright orange vest. Faux fur. To keep her warm. To brighten her up (did she want to be faux warmed and brightened?) She was always so cold, constantly losing weight, not eating so she wouldn’t have to think about adjusting her insulin. When I cleaned out her house, I took the vest home with me. I never wore it. When I moved, I gave it away. I gave a lot of things away. My sisters and I shared her jewelry. I don’t wear it (okay, I wear a bracelet, but it was mine before it was hers—another story). I look at it. Polish it. Scan it. Filter it. Fade it. Crop. Edit. Manipulate it. Until I start writing.

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