Free All the Dancing Birds by Auburn McCanta

bones. It laid its hands on her. It gave her words that felt like rushing water etching deep pathways into the stoniest of hearts.
She sat in its pews only long enough for the Holy Spirit to take hold and shake her by the neck. Then, she jumped and twitched and danced in its aisles, waving her arms and speaking in strange, nonsensical words. She was slain in the Spirit so often a spot was reserved just for her, where she could crumple to the floor, her arms flickering in little spikes of trembling mystery.
Your MeeMaw’s eyes might have been dying, but her wild prayers flung to heaven were as alive as anything ever sent heavenward from the lips and hands of a churchgoing Southern woman while caught up into a visionary cloud of witnesses all crying at once, Amen and Amen .
Once a month, the ladies of the Glad Tidings Holiness Church of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, passed around tiny cups of grape juice and plates filled with cut-up pieces of white Wonder Bread. Ma said Jesus lived in the bread; he swam in the grape juice. On those Communion Sundays, I would sit in the pew next to Ma and feed her a piece of bread, then hand her a little cup of juice. Afterward, she would sit, her eyes like blue taffeta, little Jesusy prayers falling from her lips, her face mesmeric like an angel’s.
She was simply enchanted.
I remember when you were small, I would wonder if Ma was looking down from Heaven to see me carefully washing your hands before we sat at the table and then neglectfully forgetting to show you how to lace your little washed fingers together to thank God for the peanut butter and jelly sandwich you were about to eat. At night, I wondered if she saw that we never kneeled next to your beds, our hands in prayerful little steeples, saying our Now I lay me down to sleeps and asking for our souls to be kept or taken, depending upon whether we woke or not the following morning. We did none of those things. We didn’t pray. We didn’t go to church. We didn’t boldly raise our eyes to the ceiling, or bow our heads in humility.
I taught you nothing but the purity of hopscotch. I told you that poets and writers and possibly even mathematicians would one day decipher heaven. I taught you that your heads were always meant for kissing rather than condemning.
I taught you nothing churchy.
Of course, we could have spent our Sundays like your PaaPaw, at the side of a stream with fishing poles sticking out from our bodies. I could have taught you how to thread worms and toss out your line so it didn’t snag in a knot or catch under a rock.
I was neglectful there, as well.
I didn’t thrill you with stories of how the North Carolina sky filled every morning with yellows and blues and its tree branches dripped down like heavenly green rain. I should have, at the very least, told you about the Blowing Rock. You would have loved it‌—‌that large rock hanging out over John’s River Gorge like it had risen from the ground, a wild swelling ocean wave, only to be frozen solid into one reckless and furious moment of foam and watery heft. It was said the wind caused the snow to blow upside down and your own words to blow right back into your mouth.
Can you imagine that an entire town was built around a rock and upside-down snow‌—‌and yet I told you nothing of it?
It was there that your PaaPaw and I stood one wind-blown Sunday morning, our hair standing straight up from our heads, our voices screaming out for the wind to bring your MeeMaw’s eyes back to her. Her eyes stayed blind, of course. But still I stood beside your PaaPaw, our hands clutched together, our voices raw in the wind, our bodies bent and thrust over the edge of the Appalachian Mountains until we took on the same curved and wild shape of the Blowing Rock. It was magnificent!
I should have told you about it all, about how I danced the aisles of the Glad Tidings Holiness Church and also how I fiercely screamed into a wind so brutish it could cause snow to fall upside