My Godmothers, Portraits, Vol. 1

Brenda is an OB nurse at Serria Nevada Memorial Hospital. You can see the hospital from the highway. If Brenda were on the side of the highway you could probably see her too for her piles of greying brown curls shout out to be seen. Her heart is the kind of heart that envelopes other hearts into a warm, maternal place where you can cry and laugh and play poker with cash and chocolate as incentive. I can imagine her lovingly drawing new life forth from between legs bloodied and bare with her curls packed into sanitary submission. She whispers, "Rejoice!" into the the little ears, red and wet and new like unfurling rose petels covered in dew.

Sharon Rose married a Canadian ex-pat with an Italian accent and a penchent for asking deeply theological and metaphysical questions of eleven year olds as well as everybody else. This is her second husband. The first tried to kill her with a kitchen knife. She lost one daughter to a house fire on New Years Eve. Her other daughter is wasting away slowly as she fights a battle with the food gods. The son passes his time in imobililty and on various drugs. Sharon walks her labarinth of lavender and laughs at dinner parties and takes the wandering and misfit souls into her arms and feeds them pasta. In my closet hangs a hand-me-down gold party dress of Sharons. When I wear it I will listen for the echos of her footsteps. Each step sounds out, "Rejoice!", one in front of the other.

Janet and my father knew eachother before they were born. They grew up with fingers stained black each walnut picking season in a sleepy suburb in the Bay Area when the trees used to grow. Their pathes diverged. Janet penciled in her eyebrows, a thin hard line contrasting with the softness of her face. She married young, soon divoraced, and then got her masters in speech pathology. She married again, to a tall quiet man with grown children and a soft voice. Janet loves costume jewelry and keeping her nails polished and long. She loves Bluegrass music and camping in the Winnabago. She loves her extended family, her country and her hairless, tumor riddled dog. From the tips of her shining fingers to the soles of the fuzzy house slippers she tells everyone, loud and clear, "Rejoice!"