Culture
I’m posting early to help celebrate
Culture is that second skin, laid down so close to mosquito bites and freckles I didn’t even see it. Isn’t this how everybody makes soup, sets the table, welcomes the end of the week and tucks away to dreamland? Well at Ellen’s the soup had dill. Mike’s Mom cried when we sang. Gina had Christmas.
They rubbed my second skin with the liniment of literature: stories of stories the way my parents heard them; parts forgotten; untranslated; skipped or stopped; with belly laughs at punch lines that were never uttered. Well, everybody knew that old story—didn’t they?
My Grandmother’s story left out different parts than Amy’s Grandfather telling. Practice paraded through ears, eyes and nostrils in cramped kitchens and mahogany halls. Orders and legions of never written mandates governed what dress to wear, who to greet and how—poked and prodded by grudges, invasions, and insinuations.
Perhaps those traditions were carefully embroidered on my cuticle, binding in biology, melody, and cadence, bathing each cell from womb-time. Each cell dies; each cell is born. The shield reinforces and reinvents, supports and censors.
There’s tension skin against skin: shushing breaths; whirring of earth beneath my feet; the heat, cold, and indescribable smell of fall-turned leaves. The names that came, the reasons, the tastes that joined those season-smells. Where did I get that? How did it happen to me before I even knew?
It’s in there still, no matter what else crowds in or purges out. It’s in there, in charge, singing in the corners of my mind, spinning out minor chords and faded doilies. It’s as inadvertent and essential to me as it always has been: step, by song, by soup bowl, by belly laugh.
