Mama Day by Naylor Gloria;

Author:Naylor, Gloria;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all the while years melted down into the fraction of a second. The clocks and calendars we had designed were incredibly crude attempts to order our reality—nearing the close of the twentieth century, and we were still slavishly tied to the cycles of the sun and the moon. All of those numbers were reassuring, but they were hardly real. Reality was the unshaven face in my mirror, the sound of your running water in the coffee pot, and where was the calendar to explain that when I woke up yesterday—yes, yesterday—it was the first time and now it was the fifteen hundredth? We’d invented nothing, had yet to conceive of anything, that could chart the mental passage of time. Looking in that mirror and hearing you in the kitchen, I could truthfully say, I’ve been with her all my life and I’ll be with her for the rest of my life. That instant I could say that, and the next and the next. The life without you resided only in my memory, and the more time we built up, the more distant that memory would become. I understood then how couples lasted forty, fifty years. Get through the eternity of the longest day and you’ve gotten through them all. And we had made it through with a silent consensus that even our worst days were manageable enough to be endured forever. With that as the bottom line, our constant tug-of-wars went on. It was all about change, wasn’t it? Inevitable change. I know I resisted it much more than you to wake up one morning and wonder what all the fuss was about. My house had become our home. And after four years “our” things were starting to outnumber what had been your things and my things.

And slowly we found ourselves wrestling within a whole new set of horizons. Diets. A ceramic mortar and pestle suddenly appeared in the cabinet. And your concoctions of parsley, thyme, basil, sage, and tarragon tasted far better than my regular salt substitutes. But I hated chives—why did you insist upon putting chives in that mixture? A touch of mint gave the same results. I was always a better cook than you, so it was grated parsnips instead of carrots to sweeten tomato sauce. Two egg whites alone cut down my cholesterol much more than adding a whole egg with little difference to the texture of a cake. If I had taken time to think about it, I would have laughed. We’d be squared off at both ends of the kitchen, and since when had I bothered with those things at all? Since you had started growing fresh herbs on the windowsill and in the back yard. Since your letters from Willow Springs, filled with advice about “keeping that boy’s heart ticking.”

The video cassette recorder. If you used

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