Secrets About Washerwomen

The last time I hummed was while riding the bus in the balmy mouth of May, tucked between an Italian man and fleecy schoolchildren. I stood as steady as I was able, elbow cocked outward and upward in the appropriate capital "L." My chin was tucked in polite contemplation. Sweat and cigarsmoke and laundry detergent made the skin above my nose crease.

The driver had the radio turned to a local station, something that's become something else by now, and a song came on that had played at my brother's wedding. I had been maybe six at the time (had shredded my dress in the church hedges) (had smeared it with mud, like warpaint, while chasing after garden things) and as a young and selfish thing had completely ignored my brother and his bride. I couldn't even say the color of the bouquet. The sound, though - the wedding band, playing that song, the boys from the nearby highschool with their untrimmed guitarstrings dangling like the snaggled beards of medicinemen - that stayed, somehow. It came crawling out after twenty year's incubation creaky and thick and unsummoned.

I don't hum but I can feel the want of it rolling warmly from its sleeping place; or not quite the want of it, though maybe. More the want that was behind it. I can feel it like tremors through a telephone wire while I'm stitching my work slacks, or peeling potatoes, or hammering new limbs onto the coffeetable. Not only the wedding song but other songs too. Sometimes it feels wrenching and unnatural. Hot honey poured onto a Greek god's harp melted down into an ointment ore.

Sometimes it is the pinprick of pizzicato. One day, a full choir.

In the indecisive days of winter when the spring brings a limbo of itself, maybe-yes-warm-mostly-no days, seashore days, it is wrenching and rending enough to double me over with its morphine mourning and glittering gutter. It's those days that I drop my knives, or bowls, or French china, and take the kitchensink as a kickstand.

Afterwards I write one of my letters to myself. If there's time. These all end with Stay remorseless, Stay in love, though none are ever signed.

This morning I stood barefoot, on the wooden porch, to force my blisters to breathe. I ate two mangoes without mercy. Their sugars took root in my face and hands like warpaint.