Above: From last year’s Folktale Week, working through the Pinocchio story which promoted me to complete a manuscript this summer!
PROLOGUE
Each year I host a darling of an instagram production called Folktale Week. I join in because I love a story to read into and read out of and read into again. I love reimagining a story and its concepts in pictures and reinventing an old tale with my words to fit whatever it is I hope for the present. Whatever I am going through, and it seems the last three autumns have brought me much to go through, I bring it to my work.
Earlier today, I read Michael Judge’s brilliant piece on Ted Hughes mentioning his collection “Birthday Letters—88 pieces written for Sylvia Plath, Hughes’ goal "mainly to evoke her presence to myself and to feel her there listening.” I am focusing on this in the following piece, paying attention to the terrors unfolding in Israel, in Gaza, to innocent people, all of them regardless of divisions, my people and also to the my people who belong to the organization that is my ancestry.
I ended up, through the conversation, pondering Genesis in this piece, calling up the extraordinary beauty and pain of beginnings, which I was reminded by Mordecai Martin in my writing group that Genesis is what Jews return to each Fall after the Torah is finished for the year to begin a new year. Maybe this is a working out, via listening, via conversation, the things that cannot be worked out…as is the stigma of being a Jew or a Palestinian in the world now, being hated, one dehumanizing the other, the spaces where there is good, the spaces where there isn’t, the many places in between. It is complicated I know. The rawness of these last few weeks is a stinging thing and I don’t pray but I pray for families hurting the most and for the traumatized generations to come. I sit with that along with wondering if I’ll ever understand anything or if understanding is imaginary too and perhaps now well beyond the point. Maybe the way we show up for one another right now is the point, what we can put aside to listen and show up, keep remaking the world with every sunrise.
Genesis
“The thing about making things is that you have proof. You know you have proof everyday that something has been accomplished, that something’s different. And you know if you make something as that proof, it’s a lot of power.” -Unattributed in my journal
Days here were sweeter in harvest season. The fruit trees I knew and some I didn’t, the plums, the peaches, especially the apples, were giving and we stepped into what felt like a magic potion or a medicine show. Today I’ve been quiet because I have nothing to give. No sweeter fruit, just this. -Me
“I feel bad for people who think there is only one kind of peach,” I said to my husband.“Maybe that’s why country people think city people are stupid,” he said.“We must be both kinds of stupid I guess” I tell him, as we two lean side by side holding our peaches over the sink. And that was a kind of paradise as the dog looked up and juice was everywhere.
Maybe I’ve walked into an abyss and can never go back, I said, but didn’t actually say it because I don’t want him, or you, to take this the wrong way.
“I don’t know what that means,” he says. He hears it anyway. You see it too. Well, I say carefully, it means I don’t think I want to go back to NY. To Queens. I want to wrap my dog in my tail and hide out in the apricot tree. I want you to come here and if they come to the door tell them I never existed. This life is a hard one but easier than…
“Grace has been saying every day we should go down to her mother’s where there are so many apples she doesn’t know what to do.” I guess he didn't hear the rest.
“They’ll all go to waste” she said. She said, “The kids have taken what they want. I’ve already brought two boxes a week to the food bank Mejita. You can have as many as you want,” I report what she says back to him as we get in the car to take her to the non-existent farmers market in Peñasco where there is only a tent with shitty breakfast burritos and a lady selling crafts. We stop along the road when we see two tents, one a man selling dry beans from San Luis up in Colorado, the other a lady wearing a surgical mask selling apples and small bowls of chiles.
“Hi Grace,” says the lady, “It’s me,” and she takes down her mask a little. They begin to speak in Spanish. Grace says “ohhh” and smiles and buys some banana chiles. “I don'’t grow these but Lebeo likes them.” She has a lot of apples though. I buy a 5 pound bag of bolita beans from the man. When Grace hears the price is $10 she gives me a look. I buy them anyway. I tell her, “it’s a little too much but everything is a little too much now.” I joke that maybe they are old beans, the kind she likes most, because she says old beans make the creamiest beans. She doesn’t laugh, just looks sideways out the window at the goldening hills between Picuris and home like she does and says, “You hope!”
“Want to see my mother’s apples?” She asks when we hit the edge of town so we drive past our usual turn for home, our house across from hers, where Lebeo might be waiting for her, looking at the walls, and we drive a few roads further to her mother’s orchard with her anyway.
I had never seen the house she grew up in, a small house at the end of a small dirt road surrounded by other small old houses on a kind of small point. There is a long road beyond the point which points downhill into a long orchard. All the small houses emptying out into a long long orchard seemed unfathomable but that’s just magic thank god.
“My father built it,” she says. And all the fathers built the other houses too I guessed. Grace was born in 1931. No one lived in here anymore but she keeps it. She even brings her laundry here on Thursdays. Once the load is in, she walks around the house finding things, asking the ghosts how they are. “How are you?” she says to the house, walking, touching the tall purple asters in the sun, smiling at us.
When we emerge into the old long orchard of ancient trees from the treacherous old scarp, thick with yelling wild rose and horned sumac, elderly branches are breaking with the weight of fruit of all kinds and colors. We are walking into Eden. We are finding beautiful specimens, touching them, gentling around, yanking the prettiest, eating from all the trees, loading our pockets, stuffing them down our shirts in greedy numbers, noticing Grace walking and examining, noticing how her body conforms here too, to every blade of overgrown grass, each curve and secret ditch and wildflower on the land.
She shows us a plum that has the tiniest sweetest pale burgundy fruit. She shows us a tree whose variety she doesn’t know but we each try one, flesh speckled with cotton candy, the skin a chalky deep rouge which I wish was a lipstick color and I only say that when the color is so beautiful I nearly weep. I make a mental note of this wish, this color, lips like that.
“I've never seen this one before.”
“My father planted it,” she said
“These are good for eating.”
“These are good for pies.”
“I make apple sauce with these.”
“See how the summer apples have rotted around the tree? I just couldn’t get to them all this summer,” she says. She seems wistful, a nice word for a vague longing made visible.
When we get to the bottom, I see a strange bent tree with fruit a waxy pale greenish, but some are yellow-pink, most are smallish, many have freckles. Some are largish— no freckles. A magic tree hybridizing quietly, bending onto the grass beneath it, maybe bowing to it.
“I don’t know what this one is. My father planted it so long ago. It’s some old variety you don’t see anymore.” When I bite into it it tastes faintly of bananas and girlhood.
“A banana apple?”
“A girlhood apple.”
"An orchard apple?"
“A yellow pink apple.”
“A freckled apple.”
“An apple freckle.”
"An unusually good apple.”
“An apple a day apple.”
“A crack in the earth apple.”
“A crack in the story apple.”
“A romp in the orchard with grace apple.”
“A worm in the apple.”
“An apple in the worm, the snake, the tree.”
“A tree apple.”
“A snake apple.”
“An Adam’s apple?”
“An Eve’s apple.”
“A father’s apple?”
Ippolito was her fathers name. “An Ippolito apple”
When we get back to the top, next to the house above the orchard, an old wool coat is outside. It looks like a driving coat from the 50’s, brown and blue plaid, collared.
”Oh thats my father’s coat. I was using it to cover the peaches because they said there’d be a frost.
All the apples I had put inside my shirt fell out on the ground. Jim takes a picture. Grace laughs, gets a bag and helps me pick them up.
I imagine the inside of the little house is tidy and perfectly in tact. I can see thin cotton yellowing through the window. Sometimes Grace is wearing something new and I notice and she says it was from her mom’s, like she’s snuck something out, released its proof once more, keeps it in the family. We don’t go inside
We keep walking, now over the old old organization of Grace’s ancestors. The house of her father and her mother, then Grace, then just Grace’s mother, then no one’s. It is Grace’s. It will be a son’s or maybe a grandchild’s or maybe a great-grandchild’s soon. Soon she said it will be one of theirs, why would I sell it? I understand I say. How blessed you are. How radiant you are in your orchard near your old old house in your old old town.
Jim comes back the next day with boxes of every kind of apple. He’s going to make the boozy kind of cider. He ’s going to wash the apples gently in a bath of cool water and run them through the hand press until juice like a muddy sweet river flows out, and I watch as he says he saw a baby bull snake in the grass in the shade of an apple tree in Grace’s orchard. I listened as he told me about it and looked at his arms and how strong he is, how beautiful.
“Did you see how Grace walked through her childhood land, in and out of the trees? She seemed a little wistful?” He asks holding an apple.
Quite often she tells us, “Lebeo wants me to sell it but its my home.”
”Wistful is a nice word for sadness I say.
“Grace isn’t sad though. Wistful is just a moment. Wistful is just a thought. Wistful goes away if you’re not the type to fall into an abyss.” I don’t think thats true, but I prefer not to depress anyone today.
I have been drawing a lot of snakes in August.
Maybe in Eden the snake came out in August and made ripple with the apples in September, and, intoxicated, needing a partner in crime, it found a beautiful woman. Eden was filled with as many fruit trees as Grace’s parents house. So many delicious things, so many temptations, just one snake. I bet Eve gained a lot of weight in that Eden. I always go back to genesis.
“When Eve ate the apple, thats when women’s problems began,” said my mother more than once.
“Oh,” I always thought. Oh, I think now as I unpack snake after snake after snake.
Lebeo tells, “Once there was a man who lived across the river just here,” he points from his chair on the portal to the back of his house, “His name was Juan Punché.” He is laughing. “Punché means tobacco. He used to smoke a lot I guess.”
“He only had one arm so he used his machete with his one other hand.” He shows me how and where Juan Punché’s arm was cut off, making hand gestures slicing his own forearm off.
Juan Punché’s arm apparently was cut off at the elbow. I am thinking this is a horror and I can see Lebeo get a little serious after the gestures and I can see when he’s finding that it’s ok to smile again. “I don’t know how he lost it—it must have happened in childhood.” And then, “He was a gambler though.”
Grace says, “No No Lebeo! That wasn’t Juan Punché, that was someone else who lived down there, further down El Bosque!”
Lebeo continues a story he’s told me many many times. “When I grew up here we had enough food. We had trees and grew corn and chiles and had pigs and chickens. But sometimes I would take an apple to school and would you believe,” pointing a finger, “some kids would ask me for the core when I was done? That’s how little they had. It was the first time I understood that. So I always brought an apple to school after that, maybe took a bite and gave the rest away.” The first time he told the story it was one particular kid who asked for the core. Now it was many kids who asked him for the apple. I know in those days every apple was sacred, why Grace is concerned that her mother’s trees, her father’s trees, when wasted are a waste of hard-earned apples, a waste of food that others don’t have. So many trees. So many apples. So much food.
We talk and watch the sunset. Lebeo splices in while Grace and I are talking, “oh,” he’s saying—look at that! Look how the sun is going behind the mesa.” It happens fast now that its fall. Its clay is sparkling bright pink.
“We used that mesa for its clay to make bricks for these houses. We dug at the bottom of that one and that one and that one”, pointing to different hills.
Grace shakes her head and grimaces. “He never built a house.” I smile and give her the “its ok look” we have.
He tells me, “when I was a teenager, everyone had nicknames,” and “Look how nice the ball of sun it looks in the tree”. I imagine the grass under all the trees and Juan Punché sending smoke signals and smoke signals and one arm pinned to his shirt even though we weren’t talking about the same man with the nickname Punché, a brand of tobacco.
“My name was Lebeo which was a strange name so I didn’t need a nickname!” He says this now that he has my attention. The stories he loves to repeat are my own joy. He is grinning at the cleverness and I am smiling at his grin and his wryness and now we are all laughing because Grace is charmed by her husband of 70 years. “Seventy three years I have been married to this woman.”
Grace gives me a look, I picture them laughing like teenagers with nicknames, all the laughing, I am guessing, at Juan Punché who didn’t have a severed arm after all, a man who smoked like such a fiend he went up in flames. Laughing like teenagers at the man with the severed arm, who used a machete and gathered the corn both with the other.
“Seventy” I say. The snake severs the three off. “Aye Mejita,” says Grace, “He doesn’t remember.” He is confused by the numbers. He is turning 1953 into 73, turning Juan Punché into a one armed man, turning all the beautiful apples into temptation. Maybe here, in this passage, I am his golem. Maybe in this state, I am conjured by dust to correct him. Grace smiles. Maybe he was the golem to all the boys who had not even an apple to eat, he gave them his core, they gave him a feeling like he meant something in that cruel world of struggle and poverty.
In 1953 they were so young, they used to laugh like nothing was wrong in the world, like no one ever was old, like there were never any snakes with nicknames, like there were never any snakes who could turn them cruel, like there were never the snakes that led us into temptation and if there were, they changed us for the rest of these unscientific days of not remembering the math, of not remembering what we’ve always done to each other, of not remembering the brilliant light of the orchard on a Sunday afternoon, of not finding the ending until its the end and there are so many names, and so many apples, like there are so many apples, like there are so many apples, like there are enough apples to go around and around and around to make a kind of ending. Some days are impossible to end.
Some days are impossible to end.
your writing and readings provide my heart with fresh fruit and vitamines .Thank you.
Beautiful.