Submitted Stories

Gimlet

Warm summer evenings often provided the perfect setting for my parents to sit down outside in the sweet scented dusk next to our pool, sip their cocktails and talk.  I loved those times.  They would become adults instead of parents, to my teenaged eyes.

My mother would make an effort and coif her hair, wear nice clothes and pretty little feminine sandals.  She’d look so different than her day-to-day mom-ness.  And with my adult eyes looking back I realize that these were “date” nights and that I was witnessing pre-foreplay!

One particular evening, she was wearing a full-length orange and white caftan with little sparkly shell earrings, both of which I still have.  She was sipping her favorite drink, a vodka gimlet; bright lime wedge, blue swimming pool and night blooming jasmine.  They were talking about adult things, their day, the current state of affairs and at some point my mother made some kind of blue joke, or a double entendre which was more her style.  She was clever with words, even during the times when she was not so fun.

Usually I knew my mom as a reserved, stern sort of woman, often feeling put upon by her coldness toward me.  She didn’t have a lot of warmth or fun to share with her only daughter.  So this surprising and welcome event, of seeing my mother outside of my usual point of view was a wonder.  Finally, a sight of a different way to be female. Here was my mother showing the feminine, flirtatious side of womanhood.  A quick study of another way to be.

In hindsight, I see that I was dying for a glimpse of that choice, that model and as life would have it, later in my life I would opt NOT to become a mother several times over.  I wasn’t ripe enough inside, to be able to consciously choose between the stern and the playful and the wiser part of me knew, deep down, that I would visit the first-learned harder part of my makeup upon any little one that would come into my life.  Ah, if I had known then what I know now.

But, time has magically blended the sweet and sour of my earlier years. And though such brief fun encounters with my mother were few and far between, I waited for those moments, the smallest opportunities to grasp what I REALLY needed to know about life, what I REALLY needed to reconcile in order to find peace and what I REALLY needed to embrace in order to have the freedom of expression in my creative life.

by jaa  Email: janglindes@toast.net

Seamstress

In the spring of my third grade in school, the wind and rain often battered our house, perched as it was on the beach. Our screened back porch, raised up on spindly legs that sprouted from the sand, faced the Gulf of Mexico. From there I could see the raging advances of dark storm clouds and hear the first splattering of rain drops on our tin roof. Scampering down the steep staircase to the sand below, I could run in the rain to the sea wall and watch the foaming surf, safe from its grasp.

While the backside of our house was exposed to a wilderness of elements, our front porch opened right onto Main Street, at the bustling center of the small town of Pass Christian, Mississippi, in the late 1940s. My Catholic school was a skip and a hop across the street and so was the church, a general store, shoe store, grocer, and a movie theater. The street was always filled with a rush of traffic, since it was also the highway running straight through town on its way to New Orleans or Mobile.

Our family had a shop in our house, my mother’s, called Southern Women’s Exchange, with its painted wooden sign proudly hung from a front room window. Filled with “look, but don’t touch” delights, our parlor displayed fancy Creole dolls, quilts, embroidered hankies, and delicate hand painted buttons. Among the homemade pralines and postcards were items my mother had sewn, aprons, potholders in colorful prints and rickrack. Much later she told me that of all her life achievements, running this quaint store with its local crafts had given her the most pleasure.

Though little of the “Pass,” as we called it, remains, falling victim to the full force of hurricanes Camille and Katrina, my mother held our few years there even more precious. It was a simple life back then, right after World War II, charming with French Creole culture, shrimp boats blessed by the priests at the start of the season, and the welcoming townspeople. A petite, energetic woman, my mother could walk everywhere and find her place with home and work, family and school, all within arms’ reach. Though we were poor, so was most everyone else.

That spring, as the long days of Lent came to a close, I began to think of Easter when everyone would wear Sunday best clothes to church. One afternoon, my mother and I went shopping for a dress pattern at the general store where I picked out a Vogue pattern for an elaborate dress. Printed on the pattern envelope was a sketch of a girl with long curls, wearing a pink dress with flounces at the hem. There were pink ruffles all around a lace yoke, edged with a black velvet ribbon that was woven through the lace and tied in a bow over her heart. It was a fantasy dress, beautiful and frilly. I squeezed the fat envelope in my hands as my mother paid the salesclerk 25 cents.

But a tissue paper pattern was hardly a dress.

“We’ll see what we can do….” my mother sighed, her voice trailing off.

The image of the longhaired girl with the finger curls, shiny black shoes, and straw hat in that perfect pink dress lingered in my girlish dreams, but I knew better. My mother would rummage in her sewing basket and find some fabric left over from the aprons or the potholders. My dress would be bright and well made, but not that confection of pink and white lace. I just knew.

One day when I came home from school, I heard the whirring sound of the sewing machine. My mother was bent over the machine, seeming to sew in a furious rush.

She stopped, exclaiming, “It’s done!” She was beaming with mischief. “Surprise!” she cried.

And she whisked her work from the machine and held it up to my unbelieving eyes. It was the dress, the pink dress with the lacy yolk and the black velvet ribbon.

“Mommy, how did you do this so fast?”

“I sewed all day, every minute, to have this finished before you came home.”

My eyes filled with tears and amazement. We hugged each other, the dress flattened between us.

“Try it on; try it on,” she urged.

Of course, it was just right. There was a sash and a bow at the back that cinched my waist. Then she tied the black velvet bow over my heart.

On Easter Sunday I wore that pink dress with black patent leather shoes and a wide-brimmed straw hat. I posed for a picture just before church holding a single white lily.

How my mother managed to buy the fabric and ribbon I never knew, much less the shoes and hat. What I thought then was that she was a magician; she could weave from thin air. I now realize that her skill as a seamstress coupled with her determination made her daughter’s girlish dream come true. But I wore more than a dress that Easter; I was outfitted for a lifetime adventure of making things happen.

by Kate Farrell