When I was a child, there was a placed called heaven. It was bounded by acres of rolling farmland. I could glimpse these fields in the distance, but they are not really part of this story and my heaven ended at a near hill’s horizon.
To the west was the River, close enough to feed a local riverlet and to smell the river’s black loamy earth mingling with the cut grass field and the new summer dress of a back country road’s asphalt.
In heaven, there was RC Cola, Yoo Hoo, orange sherbert Push-Ups and nut-covered chocolate ice cream cones.
There were angels in this world. They sat on a bench in front of the angel store, were dressed in bib overalls and Caterpillar or John Deere hats and chewed tobacco, then spat juicy streams of brow effluvium onto the sidewalk.
Heaven had a post-office. It had a beauty shop and it had choirs of seraphim, rough as corn cobs, gentle as Red Cross cotton balls. They were strong and stern guardians that spoke in the secret language of the south, made buttermilk cornbread that dripped molasses manna.
There were softly-clad angels as well. They wore very high-heeled, open-toed sandals, polyester pantsuits and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. One hand clutched their fake leather cigarette cases, while the other fluttered as if describing a sacred, binding symphonic spell. That spell held everything together; all the pieces of this choir that stretched across the bottomland of heaven.
All were guardians to this child in my skin, but like George Bailey, I had my Clarence, or Clarenci, as there were two angels just for me. They came from God – I know this now. Of my grandmother, I will say little. Her love was all-encompassing and fierce and the tears have not yet stopped nor have the years given me room to speak or leave to write about her.
My great-aunt was the shadow in the background. I have never understood how she could be so invisible so often and yet be everywhere. She spoke, she cooked, she went off on mysterious vacations to remote and exotic places like Evansville and Minneapolis where she had been a nurse – angeling for others in the cold north where they knew nothing of butterbeans or fried breakfast tomatoes.
