Vegetables Help the Dream Go Down, by Carla DeMello

I saw my dear teacher eye the pack of cigarettes on the table and then pretend she hadn't. Feeling fractious because of all the things I wanted to know about her but didn’t allow myself to ask, I blurted "you know, smoking will make you infertile."

I saw just the softest loss of color around her lips and I immediately hated my inner artichoke's hateful pokes.

Why can't I be just peas? Uncomplicated, part of a unit, always sweet, loved even by children, perfect in almost every state . . . but even their sweetness is fragile, too quickly becoming slimy and stinky as they melt into their opposite selves. Little green liars they are.

Can I be taro root? Hard, mysterious, hairy, potato's Hell's Angel, the thing my mother admired for its exotic purple flour, the color of promised sweetness. Or was that something else entirely? Yam I am?

I cross my leg and bump the table, which makes the cigarettes jiggle. She gets up and walks away from them and me, leaving me to muddle out of my self-imposed slickery taro/yam conundrum. She stands by the window, her gaze stretching far out over the ocean to a point I could never see.

She says "You know, I had a ginger root child and he was dear and bright and spicy. But when he began to wither I panicked and put him in soil to keep him fresh. It was what he needed but in giving him his own life I eventually lost him to sprouts, then stems, then leaves, and when he flowered I knew he was no longer mine. When I smoked I could fill my empty corners with a thickness that mimicked the fullness I'd lost, for just a moment. And when I let out the smoke I could see shapes like my little ghost ginger baby for brief seconds. They helped me let him be flowers."

I sit there, a rotting tomato watching her strong asparagus back with my seedy, once acidic eyes. Why do I forget that there are places others have been that I can't even imagine? Why do I want to poke my dear one who I love more than I even yet know? I'm not even worthy of sauce.

She turns back and looks at me more kindly than any rotting tomato was ever looked at and her kind eyes gently guide me away from my crisis of identity. I am not peas or tomatoes or something not even a mother could love. I come back to my best artichoke self, able to be transformed by heat, tough and tender, sweet around the prickles, one flavor alone, a thousand other flavors erupting when combined, often beautiful, always wild.

My New Age, by Lynne Taetzsch

Seventy. My new age. Never did I think I would end up here at the place where you really know you’re near the end — not the end of a sentence or a paragraph or even a chapter, but THE END.

And yet, I feel like I’ve started a new beginning. I have this sense of freedom — of life on my own. Not “Lynne Alone” in a dreary, clamped-down, barely-surviving mode, but Lynne with a still healthy-enough body and mind to LIVE.

And how will that be?

I step out into the world to try Zumba classes at the local YMCA. After the first ten minutes of class I am both winded and mortified by my inept attempts to follow the teacher’s steps.

But I stay for the hour. And I promise myself I will go to Zumba once a week for six months before I allow myself to quit.

I buy Zumba dance shoes and Zumba lessons on a dvd so that I can practice at home. I have always been a good and conscientious student and I apply myself to Zumba.

I meet a good friend at the Y, the friend who introduced me to Zumba.  We don’t drive together because she goes an hour earlier in order to use the weight machines first. Then she eats a healthy snack in the lounge, and that’s where I meet up with her before class starts.

This good friend tells me that Zumba is her favorite hour of the week. I am hopeful that it will someday become mine.

About three months later, I actually have a day when I don’t hate Zumba class for the whole hour. I have started to get the knack of executing some of the steps, keeping the rhythm, moving in sync with the class.

I am so happy.  I see this as a possible breakthrough for me. Maybe each coming week I will have more and more good times in Zumba class. And I am always happy to spend an hour with my friend.

The next week our teacher says she has just come back from a Zumba conference and that she brought three new songs back with her. That day we do not dance my favorite songs. They are replaced by the three new songs.

I hated the whole hour of Zumba that day.

Now it’s been five and a half months since I started Zumba. I still hate it.

Monday I confessed to my friend that I was not going back to Zumba ever again.

I found something new to try, something more modest in aspiration: strength training class at the senior center.

“You’re going to that class with all the old people?” my sister says.

“Yes.”  I am seventy years old now and I’m allowed to go to a class for old people.

When I walked into the large room at the senior center — early, like I get to everything — there were a couple frail old ladies with white hair setting out chairs and small weights. I introduced myself and they told me to get a chair and some weights.

Have I made a huge mistake? Do they perform all the exercises sitting in a chair?

Gradually more women filtered into the room and they were not all white haired and frail.  One man showed up, too, but he was white-haired and extremely frail.  When the teacher tried to get him to move his arm a particular way later in the class, he said, “My arm doesn’t go that way.”

He sat in the front row, two feet in front of the teacher. I sat in the front row, too, but close to the door, just in case.

As it turned out, we did not do all our exercises sitting down —only half of them.

The class contained a very respectable amount of stretching and weight lifting to strengthen our muscles. It even had a tiny whiff of aerobics at the beginning to make sure we were all present and awake.

At the half-way water break, the teacher told me I was doing great.

My Zumba teacher never told me that. Instead, she would periodically notice me floundering and come dance next to me as if that was going to magically correct my performance.

I was the absolutely worst dancer in my Zumba class.

In strength training at the senior center I have a chance to rise to the top of the class, if I’m not there already. I was in the front row so I couldn’t watch everyone.

After my first Zumba class, every muscle in my body ached.

After strength training at the senior center, I feel ready to tackle anything.

Lynne Taetzsch:

Website:  http://www.ARTBYLT.COM

Art Blog:  http://www.abstract-art-blog.net

Maple Moon, by Patricia Longoria

That’s a maple moon up there in the sky tonight. A maple moon caught in the bare branches of the sap tree. A maple moon set in the dark blue velvet of the winter night sky. 

A maple moon means that the trees are waking from their winter sleep, their sweet sap starting to flow. Winter is starting to amble out the door; spring is coming in.

The maple moon calls us, wherever we are, me and Buddy and Dad, and sometimes Sissy, when she can pull herself away from whatever life she is trying to live. Because a maple moon means that it is time to tap the trees and make syrup.

We head up north to Uncle Bear’s place in New York in Dad’s old Ford truck. The dented doors are gray, faded from the glossy Nile Blue I remember from my childhood. The white pinstripe that runs across it is faded, too, and peeling.

Buddy pushes the front seat forward, climbs in the back seat and sets his backpack and his bright orange sleeping bag across the seat, staking his claim. He pulls out a stack of dog-eared Car and Driver magazines, plugs in his ear phones.

I slide across the front seat and sit next to Dad, take out my crossword puzzle and set my Big Gulp between my knees. Sissy settles her skirts — layers of coral ruffles over a mimosa tulle petticoat and striped tights — beside me. Her battered suitcase is in back, in the camper. She sits in a circle of silence as she pulls her plaid flannel coat tight across her chest and fingers the beads on her bracelet.

When the maple moon calls, we answer. We trudge through the snow drifted high to Uncle Bear’s sugar shack. Buddy splits fat wedges of wood and feeds them into the fire underneath the boiler. Dad runs the lines right before dawn, checking and cleaning and fixing, making sure that the clear sap will flow through the white plastic tubes and collect in the boiler. Sissy and I stay in the hot shack, the air smoky with vapor as we stir the thickening syrup as it boils gently in rolling bubbles. We peel off jackets, sweaters, long-sleeve shirts down to faded T-shirts. Sissy’s skirts wilt. The sugar shack is a sauna, an oasis of heat and steamy vapor in the snowy woods.

The maple moon, full now, is high in the night sky when we finish the boiling. We open the door, and the air is sharp and dry, a relief after the heat of the shack. We stumble over the frozen ruts of the driveway to the truck parked beside Uncle Bear’s house. Dad and Buddy settle up front in the cab of the truck. Sissy and I sleep huddled in our sleeping bags in the camper, a thick wool blanket shared between us. The light of the maple moon slants through the slats of the camper’s narrow windows. It pools on my blanket. I cup the light in my hands and hold a memory of another maple moon.

It was a maple moon when Mama left. That bright moon outlined the bare trees and cast long shadows as she walked down the side of the road, away from the truck in the track of its headlights, away from us, and disappeared into the woods.


You can visit Pat's personal blog here:
http://zencrafting.blogspot.com/

Dictionary of Colors, by A. Brennan

Green is new life, and stomach aches. Kelly green is bad teachers, emerald green is false friends.

Red is strength: power and love and anger and all their extremes.

Blue is everything — water and sky. Dark blue is hope, clear blue is assurance.

Yellow is cleanliness and precision and clarity. Yellow is crystalline in the chemical sense, its atoms locked into a grid because they couldn't go anywhere else. If you break yellow into pieces, you will only get more yellow.

Orange is a chameleon: carefree with pink, clever with purple. I don't trust orange.

Purple is solidity, purposeful but not uninteresting. Dark purple is comfort, violet is fickle.

Pink is wavering, easily swayed, stronger in small doses.

White can't be pinned down, is always fluttering just out of reach. It might prove faithful, if it ever allowed itself to be caught.

Brown is warmth: coffee and blankets, puppies and firewood. Brown is home.

Black is tempting, enticing, and all-encompassing.

Word Collage: COLORS

This Word Collage was created at Zee's Writing Studio, in Ithaca, New York, between February 28 and March 1, 2012.

65 women, teens and children contributed to this list, as part of a 5-minute warm-up at the start of each Writing Circle.

PaintedParrot will usually feature the work of individual writers, but for this first posting I thought it would be fun to see how the collective consciousness of dozens or writers responded to the suggestion to "write something you know about color."

--zee

We painted the walls a buttery yellow to match a small vase. I've tried to capture the pinkish orange of the sunset with paints, but it always looks gaudy. When I walk in the cold, my nose gets red. I am known for wearing black. The color red makes me feel alive and warm. I've had silver hair since I was 30-something. Purple just feels right most of the time. I remember that when the Berlin Wall fell, I knew the people in Eastern Europe were celebrating the return of color. Black and white have always been too stark for me; I'm drawn to shades of gray. I love fuchsia and orange together. I dream about yellow every night. I have had more arguments with my parents about whether things are orange or pink than pretty much anything else. Wearing red or raspberry pink makes me feel daring. I used to wear a lot of blue suits to work. I love the pink glow of the sunset on the mountains. Turquoise and fuchsia are perfect accents for white hair. I've worn a blue L. L. Bean jacket for more than 15 years. Sometimes when I want to say "pink" I inadvertently say the word "yellow" instead. Blue makes me remember Germany. I want to make a quilt: lime green, aqua, and some hue of purple — periwinkle perhaps — and grey. My left eyebrow turned white overnight. Yellow is encouraging. I once had a blue parakeet. I feel like a superhero when I wear colorful tights to work. There are many days in my life when I am obsessed with red. In college I took a class in color theory. The rug in my childhood bedroom was an orange and yellow shag that I cleaned with a rake. The tattered green pillow sleeps on my side of the bed in my absence. My orange shoes are very comfortable. The sunset hangs red to the left of my house. My sheets are lilac and silky to the touch. Yellow daffodils bloom in the backyard every spring. I always liked the 1962 peacock blue station wagon. I think the color purple is otherworldly, don't you? Yesterday I bought a dress that was green in the store, but when I got home it was brown. The walls in my house were gray, chosen and painted by my husband. There is more yellow in navy blue than you might think. My mother's favorite color is neutral; she says it goes well with everything. The pink and yellow houses next to each other on Coddington Road look disgusting. Strong color strongly influences my mood. Blue is my color of tranquility. Waldorf schools don't use black crayons. I like to paint with other people. Mixing new colors, especially complimentary colors, is thrilling to me. My daughter loves indigo and gold. When archaeologists try to reconstruct color patterns on old fabric, they assume it was once red where the holes are. I've heard that gray is the new black. I loved coloring books when I was a child. I don't like watermelon pink, which may account for the way I gobble up watermelon slices so fast and save the seeds for the chipmunk. I have never met a blue I didn't like. My car is caramel-bronze-pearl — or so they told me. At the age of three, my grandson suddenly denounced pink and told me to give the new pink shirt I bought for him to his girl cousin instead. Dark blue is the color of the night sky in winter. Orange peeks through the falling blanket of night. Dive into the lake — you see through green glasses. What is "taupe," anyway? White is thought of as plain, but it is really full of ideas and bursting with desire. Green brushes my toes with bright cool grass. Some say that black is the absence of color, while others say that it is all the colors in the world. I once had four favorite colors but now I have just one. When I squeeze my eyes tightly shut, I see bright green. The color brown makes me hungry. The neon colors somehow caused the restaurant to be exceedingly dreary. Oranges are the color orange. Yellow reminds me of you. Green, in a certain shade, can represent a dismal life. One of my favorite colors is the white that happens when snowflakes are mixed with sky and you're looking up into the air and everything is clear and pale and pure and bright. Looking into her cerulean irises did for him what a prism does to white light — it split him into a thousand shimmering colors. Colors are emotions that people can only explain with a picture. Black and gold show the spirit of a wolf. Chocolate chip cookies taste green. Gray is such a restful color. Where are those yellow daffodils? By March I'm sick of reds. I write in a green notebook. I am knitting a lacy blue scarf. I'm watching for the pink tinge of new buds on the trees. I bought my sister a scarlet silk kimono. The walls are primed with white paint, and seem eager to know their new color. Autumnal colors make me feel sensual. I am attracted to clothes that are the color of my eyes. My favorite item of clothing is my little black dress. "How is my earth-tone matching working for me?" asks my color-blind boyfriend. Finally, tulips — the yellow-red stripy ones, stretching over the side of the vase. The red color on the bottom of his boots gave him away. Not all red watermelon tastes the same. I have mixed feelings about colorless rain. My jacket is the exact color of the soil in North Vietnam. When my father died he left behind his color. Red, white and blue draped across his coffin. Blue were his uniforms and blue is my heart. Wearing yellow makes me feel like I'm flying. I'm lucky that I've never lost my purple socks in the laundry. This morning, spring's first red cardinal scratching seeds in the snow. I paint in red when I'm angry, when I'm sad, when I'm happy: I paint in red. My black and white life is full of color. In the woods I see the patterns of the leaves against the sky, the shapes of the trees, and empty spaces between the clouds, but I don't see color. Deep forest — green frog ribbits rivulets of friendly greetings. Blue, ice blue, was the color of my mother's eyes; they saw everything. Sunset colors are my favorites right now — pink, orange, anything lit up. He belonged in a Blue state and she belonged in a Red state. A wise old woman told me that it is good for your eyes to look at the green of distant hills.  Johnny Cash said of his closetful of black clothes: "It's dark in there." I always thought that freshly-mowed lawn smelled blue. A friend did my colors and told me I was a "spring." She couldn't remember where she'd left her lavender self. When in doubt, orange will do! You were wearing silver, the color of the moon, and I thought to myself, "Priestess." Red is best. Gray: is it science and spirituality smushed together? Stop signs: red, danger, slow, stop, safe, listen. Brown earth, green trees; I am wearing them today and they are rich. Orange walls, not too bright, are cheering and warm. It's said that there is no such thing as a totally black cat; gray stripes appear in a certain light, or white hairs appear randomly, here and there. She walked in a halo of red umbrella reflected by the rain on the sidewalk.