Pressed Pants, Grosgrain Ribbon

Lately I’ve been remembering how her room was almost empty and everything was white, how the winter sun washed her slim girlish body in a cool marble light. Sex With One Woman (My Wife)  John H. Richardson

scribbling. Signs for the Taft High School football team, the only sign of life. Cemetery vast, green and growing. Liveliest place in town!

On hot evenings, my extended family drinks ice tea beneath Grammie‘s fig tree. Plans, plots. Schemes how to leave. Get out. An endless conversation. The only child, bored, I climb into the fig tree, listen to Hitler‘s rants spewing from Grammie‘s Philco. Oil seeps, demanding attention. Get out of Taft–Ford City. 1939. Save money. Hope. Save. In time, everyone leaves, one by one, by two, by three. All but the oldest daughter–my young mother. She alone stays. Three years after her death my stepmother (my aunt) gives me a photograph of her. No one has spoken of her; my family believes death, like poverty, does not exist if you do not acknowledge it. I tear up the photograph. Ghost Dust. 1942. We finally leave the great San Joaquin Valley. 2009. I find her worn tombstone. (1907-1937). Place a smooth stone tumbled down the Chetco River to a beach she knew. I do this for myself. Walk away. Grasshoppers continue pumping.

I get onto old Route 66, past the Bagdad Café. That funny movie. The café closed. Motel with doors ajar. Go through Cadiz, Siberia, Klondike. (Someone had a sense of humor!) Past the site of Bagdad. Town gone. Too hot, no water. Sign gone, perhaps a souvenir for someone among so many coming from everywhere, crazy about that movie. Boarded up schools, empty houses, rusted automobiles. Looks like Taft-Ford City. The Great Depression. Ghost Dust.

I enter the wondrous Mojave National Preserve. Fills me up. No words good enough. Shifting light over mountains beyond Kelso Dunes. Nothing stays the same. The gorgeous old Kelso Depot, restored, now a museum. Used to be you could go by train to Albuquerque and beyond—right through here! Ghost Dust settles on the tracks. At sunset the great cinder cones turn purple, then suddenly a patch of light. Desert instantly turns yellow, turns orange; the mountains turn red. Sandia. I am not on drugs! I am in the fascinating, the unbelievably beautiful eastern Mojave. Please, let no one find oil here!

At the Fenner turnoff an empty pool with fake Greek statuary. One stark figure lifts his arm, pointing towards heaven. All the plumbing is exposed to wind and sun and shifting sand.

I go back to the motel in Needles, my base for visiting the Mojave. Read about the failing dam, the sinking reservoirs on the Colorado. Eighty percent of the river goes to agriculture. Mostly alfalfa. Turns to steak. Needles a larger version of Bagdad. They are running out of water. They will run out of steak. On every motel a vacancy sign. Sparse traffic through Needles even in high season. A few cars dribble toward Laughlin casinos. Old Needles downtown looks as bad as Taft. Oil is black gold, they say. Water is more precious than either gold or oil. On TV a thin man looms up from clear across the country. Raises his head camel-like, sniffing for water. Tests which way the wind blows. Happy New Year! The recession is over. I shut off the TV. Tomorrow came and went yesterday.

Soon, I start back to northern California. Under the illusion I am leaving here. I think I am going home.

Pat Pomerleau-Chavez lives in Santa Rosa, California. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and in The Coracle, Sinister Wisdom, The Amazon Quarterly, Turning Wheel, The New Settler and other journals. Several years ago she added Chávez to her name in honor of one of her heroes, César Chávez.

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Pressed Pants, Grosgrain Ribbon by Donna L. Emerson

Deborah Garber

Iused to grab men in uniforms. On train platforms. I ran as fast as my legs could run in their white laced shoes to encircle soldiers‘ legs. During The War. They laughed and patted my head. How little I was. How beautiful my mother‘s smile. We were waiting for Daddy to come home from March Field. Or San Bernardino. Or Fresno. I screamed Daddy! until my voice went hoarse, looking up at men in green gabardine.

I met an Army colonel in Chicago at a conference on children twenty-five years later. Pressed pants, grosgrain ribbons. He offered solutions new to us. He wore green, like the military people I worked with at Letterman Hospital. He and I did similar mental health work. Trying to make sense out of how families were changing. Divorce now common. Military families moving every two years, trouble at school, drugs, pregnancies. He smiled, laughed a lot and made us feel that he knew best. He charmed every man and woman in the room.

We talked later at the cocktail party, all of us young professionals. I wore my Alvin Duskin three-quarter length beige coatdress, brown buttons to mid-thigh. My stockings were white with the slightest bit of lavender. His green coat