Bootstrapper by Mardi Jo Link

Author:Mardi Jo Link [Link, Mardi Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-34967-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

8

February 2006

HUNGER MOON

Awake at last, the body begins to crave,

not salads, not crisp apples and sweet kiwis,

but haunches of beef and thick fatty stews.

Eat, whispers the crone in the bone, eat.

The hunger moon is grinning like a skull.

—MARGE PIERCY, “The Hunger Moon”

The groceries don’t last. The carrots packed in sawdust don’t last. Our firewood doesn’t last. Our money certainly doesn’t last, either. As if I needed any further proof that we are scraping bottom, I’m making Will’s sack lunch for school and have to mine the sides of the peanut butter jar just to get enough of the stuff to make him half a sandwich.

I hold up the spoon and stare at this glob of caramel-colored paste, looking for a sign. A week ago, our newspaper ran an interview with an Ohio man who said he saw the face of Jesus in his pancake. I don’t see anything in our last spoonful of extra-crunchy, though.

Even if there were something (or Someone) there, would my cynical brain even allow my heart to see it?

The boys didn’t get sick but I’m still reeling a little from the flu. Still, we went to a tiny church last Sunday just down the road. Will read the sign on the door and announced this sudden realization: a god and a prince are one and the same. I smiled, thinking how meaningful it was going to be to pray alongside people from our own neighborhood and in the denomination—Lutheran—that I was raised within.

But instead of a friendly welcome, the Prince of Peace just barred me from taking communion, and right after an usher passed around the collection plate, too. Unless visitors would pledge membership on the spot, no wine and no wafer. This place didn’t feel like our church home after all, it felt more like the rural branch of a stodgy old bank. And our souls just got bounced.

“But Mom, that was just a piece of the Prince,” Will suggests, wincing at my loud tirade over religious dogma that I miraculously managed to stifle until the car ride home. “Now we just need to find the rest of him.”

At least one of us might be learning something valuable—forgiveness—on our continuing spiritual quest. I guess it shouldn’t matter if it’s not always me.

That plain old peanut butter jar probably divines our fortunes better than church rules or a hokey spiritual sign, anyway. And there is a reason the jar was empty. My grocery bill just went back up, because last week we suffered a loss.

“What’s that smell?” Owen had asked, the first one home from school.

“What smell?” My head was still congested, and so I didn’t smell anything.

“Like rotten flowers or something. I think it’s coming from the basement.”

It was.

While I was sick with that awful flu, the Big Valley lost power when a thick bludgeon of ice built up on a nearby power line. The electricity was out for only a few hours, not even long enough for what little food we had in our refrigerator to go bad, but long enough for our ancient chest freezer in the basement to die.

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