eulogy for the suburban cornstalks of my mother’s childhood - contributed by Julian Robles
"All the stalks folded low into the ground one night before you were born.
It was something I had wanted you to remember."
I. Eulogy
My grandfather and grandmother built their first home along a dusty, brown tract in Southern California, in a place where the houses careen all through the valley and into the hills.
Imagine: that dust rises, drifting toward the bright, jagged hole torn in the sky by the sun. Walls come up; then a door, sanded and painted. Their children find play and place atop sloping hills, shoes filled with pebbles and thorns. And at the end of each day, brown dirt clings to tired, brown skin.
Their home was finished one long afternoon in the daylight of that season negligent in its own passing, and they planted corn all along the front yard, loving and rewarding the land they suddenly owned in the way people do in Mexico.
My mom was embarrassed. Brown people in a white neighborhood with goddamn stalks of corn swaying above the rose bushes, complacent in their affront to those hallowed, green lawns. She learned to hide behind the steep body of that plant she resented most, afraid, knowing one day she would grow too tall.
Watch the photo: I sometimes wonder about the looks and thoughts of the neighbors beyond the frame. Are we a spectacle or another tired articulation of their fears? Brown stalks ready for harvest, brushing against brown skin...
Someone tell our neighbors they can stop worrying now; the sun has fled far beyond the hills to indulge old vanities, leaving our harvest to spoil. Brown unites in dust and rotting stalks, and in my dark palms...
At last they blend to the one color, scattered to the root.
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