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My youngest son crawls beneath my gramma's quilt these mountain summer mornings. I brace myself to brave the scuffed pine floor in my bare feet as he flops on his stomach and places vintage comics on my extra pillow. I leave him to my warm bed, leave him to carefully turn fragile pages, to become a penguin in a starched tuxedo, a lump-headed dinosaur chasing foolish researchers in some forgotten rainforest. His older brother doesn't join us, doesn't wake until I force his eyelids apart with a sharp shake.
Two days after school ended, Martin didn't carry comics to my morning bed. I tried to leave the sleep on my pillow, to drop it from my arms with a groan, a brush, but it clung to my skin, heavy, proud. I wrapped a chenille robe over faded men's pajamas and prepared to stretch my arms, my mind toward the ball of fire that hesitated along the horizon. My legs creaked as I formed the first asana. Martin giggled.
"Mom, you sound like an old lady."
His hands held a slim book with a worn cover. I didn't speak. My shoulders guided my extended hands to the floor. Hair fell across my eyes, nose, mouth, heart. I let myself become a triangle, downward dog, feet and palms flat against pine, butt in the air. Martin giggled again.
"Mom?"
He slapped the book shut.
"Yeah?"
I huffed my response. The sun didn't notice my discomfort. She stretched her rays across the Great Plains in heavenly asana, lent warmth first to the ghost town fourteen miles away, then the weed-caked airstrip where Lindbergh once landed, the criss-cross of arroyo and sage, the foundation of my home crafted from sturdy penitentiary tiles eight decades ago. I wondered whether those long-dead prisoners scratched notes in the New Mexican clay, left me pleas for cigarettes, for a perfumed letter. They paid their debt one small square rural home at at time.
"Mom, can we go for a walk?"
I lowered my butt, pressed my abdomen close to the ground, lifted my head. My hips creaked this time, a rich echo of ligament firecracker, and Martin imitated the sound with a raspberry explosion of forced air through pursed lips. I dropped the pose, let my chest rest against the floor.
"Yeah, sure. Let's go for a walk. The sun doesn't want my salutation today."
My son jumped off the bed and ran to the kitchen. I heard him open the fridge, heard the rustle of produce bag against drawer. He left his book on my pillow. Seedfolk, by Paul Fleischman. I smiled, pulled a clean t-shirt over my head and remembered the story of a girl named Kim, a girl who planted dried lima beans in a garbage-filled vacant lot to try to make her dead father's spirit notice her, remembered the way the author let a new character speak each chapter, let them tell their own story of harsh life in the city, of the welcome sight and hope those struggling bean plants offered. Martin asked me to buy him the book after his teacher read it aloud in class. We read it at home together, then he read it again, once, twice. I heard the splash of running water, and slipped my feet into beat running shoes.
We headed out the door, into the alley, past the shack with the angry chained pit bull, past a graffiti-sprayed fence. Martin handed me a plastic baggie filled with cherries. I grinned, grabbed one, and sucked the sweet flesh off the pit. Martin ate one, too, but he didn't spit the seed into the alley like me. He stopped walking, bent low, and dug a tiny hole into the dirt road. He dropped the pit inside, then carefully covered it with a gentle pat. I shrugged my shoulders. We ate another cherry. Spit. Plant. The cycle repeated until we held the last two cherries in our hands. Spit. Plant.
"Marty, I think it's great you're planting the seeds, but they probably won't grow in this alley. It takes a long time to grow a cherry tree."
Martin paused, his hands red with fruit stain. The sun continued her ascent, giving his fair hair a jolt of mountain fire. The parish priest hustled past us in his long cassock without returning our Good Morning. The pit-bull lurched with a nasty growl.
"Mom. You read Seedfolk. I'm just like Kim. I'm planting seeds where people say nothing will grow. And just watch, Mom. I will get to meet a hundred neighbors when my
