Free The Land of Mango Sunsets by Dorothea Benton Frank Page B

marital discard, and therefore a social liability, and your widowed mother—albeit a hippie who would absolutely mortify you in most circles—is waiting for you.Okra soup is simmering for your lunch and the fragrance makes your heart swell. In that moment, you find yourself wanting to relive your childhood, to be young, innocent, and free of guilt.
    In your old bedroom is the quilt, the same one your grandmother and her friends made just for you when you were a little girl…all that predictability in coming home, that there was a time when you could depend on the fact that you were wanted, missed, welcomed, and really loved by someone who knew you and loved you despite your flaws.
    Was I still? Yes. I was.
    I sat on the bed for a moment and ran my fingers over the little squares of floral, striped, and checked cotton. If I was possessed by things like fountain pens and thank-you notes, how obsessed were my presumably female ancestors and their friends who executed these miniature stitches, each of them placed at perfect intervals? How many dresses, blouses, and kitchen curtains had they saved, cut in small squares and triangles, hemmed, and laid out in a star pattern to create this quietly magnificent work of art? How many people had worked on it? Two? Six? Ten? Were they all friends? Were quilts sprung from a sense of friendship or boredom or necessity?
    These days women got together to drink wine and invest money—not that I had a problem with that. Women should absolutely have their own money and wine is a good thing. But what did they really achieve? There was something sacred about a quilt that a bulging bank account and getting looped could not rival.
    I hung my few clothes in the closet, checked my face in the bathroom mirror, and then stopped dead. Maybe it was the bright blue light of the Carolina midday, but I noticed for the first time that the corners of my mouth seemed to be frozen in a permanent frown. Something had to be done about that.
    Over soup and a crusty loaf of bread that she swore she had baked herself, I listened to my mother rattle on about the news on Sullivans Island. There was a gentleman who was teaching her to fish with a net. She pointed through the glass sliding door to a corner of the porch.
    “See that?”
    “No.”
    “Look again. It’s hanging from the nail.”
    “What in the world?”
    “I’m crocheting my own net! Even got the little sinker weights worked in it. Isn’t that something?”
    “Mother? Why are you doing this? I mean, it’s not like you can’t afford to go to Simmons Seafood and buy whatever you want…”
    She laughed again and then turned to fix her eyes on me. “Miriam? That’s not the point! You may think this is crazy talk but I’ll tell you the whole story, if you’d like to hear it.”
    “Okay. By the way, this soup is delicious.”
    “Thank you. Listen; remember that 9/11 fiasco?”
    “Who doesn’t? It happened just down the street from me.”
    “Right. More soup?”
    “Sure. Just half a bowl.”
    She got up to serve us another portion. “Well, it had an impact on me. A powerful one. I just got to thinking that if all the big cities of the world got blasted to smithereens, the odds are they wouldn’t be blowing up this place. Or at least it would take a while to discover it. And, if radiation didn’t kill me, I wanted to figure out how to live without the Piggly Wiggly. I decided that I would surely live longer if I kept a garden and ate organic vegetables and chickens fed without grain-laced pesticides and—” She stopped and looked at me again. “You think I’ve gone batty, don’t you?”
    “Not exactly. This is so good, Mother.”
    “Good. Everything in the soup was grown in my yard or a friend’s yard. Well, what then?”
    I wasn’t sure of what to say. She looked like Farmer Brown’s wife in her jeans and flannel shirt. And she hadn’t colored her long hair in a yearor more. It was ponytailed and wrapped in a knot on the back