Blind

When I was very small my grandfather lived on what was
called the college farm. In his kitchen stood a glass canister like the ones
you’d see in a doctor’s office, but this one filled with soda crackers. Net-bags
of peanuts in the shell lay ready to yield to my thumbs not just the meat, but
the woody scent. A bowl full of walnuts and pecans served as centerpiece. It
looked like, and maybe was, a cross-section of a tree, bark still attached. In
its center an array of picks bristled on a perforated cork, like quills on a
porcupine. I would sit for hours (at least it seemed like hours to me) mastering
the leverage of  the nutcracker and working
every scrap of nut meat out of a walnut shell.




In the living room, a corner near the door was full of scrap
lumber and hammers and nails and saws and drills. I generated a lot of sawdust
with these. In a bedroom my sister and I found a box of toys--a plastic
soldier, a doll perversely clad in red fur, a stuffed monkey. My mother said
they had been her toys when she was little. Inconceivable relics from the days
of dinosaurs.




Things were always growing there. I saw, for the first time,
newborn kittens, blind and shivering, each paw like a domino with its pink
pads, the claws fine as thistles. Puppies, too; Grampa’s black dog would lie on
the kitchen floor, puppies shoving each other out of the way to suckle. There
was always a runt who got left out, and I thought that was a great injustice. I
chased mice in the backyard where a pony named Sugar lived. Once I chased a
mouse under a board. I turned the board over and found a nest of pink baby
mice, and they were blind too.




The garden stretched to the horizon. At pea-picking time we
went along the rows with kitchen bowls. I ate the English peas raw when no one
was looking. I was too short to gather the corn, but I helped shuck it. The
husks felt like vinyl, and inside, among the strands of silk, were green and
black caterpillars. They moved their heads around awkwardly, as if they’d just
been awakened. Maybe they had spent their whole lives eating corn from the
inside and had never seen the light before.






Photo by Wayne T. Allison