Blue Heat by Susan DeFelice

Neighbor, how we can talk of bone-on-bone arthritis woes, our children, and the Highlander’s muscles over the fence in less than ten minutes! Listen, I have a gift for you for watching over my house whenever I’m on a trip. It’s a bright blue pottery cup with hand-painted fuchsia flowers, suns, and lime green leaves swirling around it. It looks unusual here, but it isn’t in Mexico. Stores are crammed with that lovely pottery and delicate glassware splashed with chunky abstract designs straight from the impulsive mind of the painter.

Our lives are ordinary. Our lawns are tidy, lush, but tidy. It’s hard work fighting the foliage trying to take over around here, with those nasty no-see-ums attacking your ankles, right? But this cup is unique (here) and I have decorated my house with similar knick-knacks to create an illusion of exoticism. I stay inside, watching mourning doves bully the free-spirited squirrels. Sometimes they pause and peer into the window at this person in a cage.

In Mexico I did all the tourist things. Our group chartered a boat for snorkeling. We paid a young man at the dock, then watched him hand the money to an older man, who passed it reverently to a stoic businesswoman in an A-line dress smoking a cigarillo. She tucked our stack of peso bills into her Coach purse with the grace of a hand model. The young man told us that she runs the whole marina and that the boats toting around same-said tourists are all owned by her.

After snorkeling he steered us through clear jade water to an oval beach filled with laughing children and adults whose voices were at the same pitch of wonderment, like an orchestra of birds on a warm spring morning. At a restaurant on the sand, we ate coconut shrimp the size of fists, with thick shreds jutting out. I marveled, “Can you believe how much coconut? I never can see the actual coconut when you have it at Applebee’s — it’s practically granulated. This a hell of a lot better!” The tour party I was with nodded in prayerful agreement. They were quiet but smiled and were from all over. You meet a lot of kind folks on these tours.

What I notice about Mexico is the children smiling widely but with wise old eyes. They and the adults holding their hands along the street are intertwined, entrusting one another. I wonder what creates such trust. Especially after coming home from Mexico, I feel awash in it for a while, like those children whose eyes pierce the environment, perceiving it completely.

When I am low here the laundry room is a perfect space because it serves no purpose other than housing a washer and dryer. (The kitchen wouldn’t do because my stimulating sundries are arranged in there amongst succulents flourishing under sunspots streaming through the curtains.) I lean against the washer and look out the window at the illuminated billboard of an attorney’s face wavering in the heat rising off the boulevard. He is protective yet cheesy with his shaggy hair, wide tie and tan blazer, promising you make no payments unless you win. Yet he is dressed like a seventies anchorman, as if to say, “Trust me because I’m funny!” The sky framing him is lavender, the color of twilight here that must have something to do with the angle of the sun? The billboard distracts me from that lavender hue. I stare at it and wonder why all that should be joyous rings off-key. I bring a can of beer in there, glug it down and leave the room feeling pretty brand new.

The bedroom, the coolest room even at high noon, is where I shut down and out. We can be crying about anything right, friend? It’s expected of people our age. But I laugh at the tears afterward because they’re an old crutch that puffs up your face like a pumpkin. They say the blues is a chemical thing or it’s an environmental thing, or has something to do with the demands of ego. Still, life is a growing compilation of sorrows temporarily doused by humor and trips to places like Mexico.

On the long pier there I heard “Night Moves” playing from lofty speakers and felt woozy from the heat and waffling air. Children splashed in the calm ocean under the pier, then abruptly swam hard through lulling waves like crows taking flight, weighed down by the t-shirts that clung to them. I was a kid in a town with the same kind of heat and humidity, but with the scent of pine instead of salt in the air. We swam in t-shirts too, in cold, still quarry water. From our tinny AM radio CKLW spilled the hollowed-out, fathomless Motown sound of strength and sadness: God bless you. You make me feel brand new. Our stomachs growled from the summer diet of powdered milk, cereal and penny candy. We hoarded tarnished coins gathered from sidewalks and tar parking lots that made the candy so, too young and immersed to be burdened by introspection. Life was outdoors up to when the streetlights flickered on.

The children trudged up Los Muertos beach and collapsed onto bright towels, jewellike under the yellow sun. Children are so tired after swimming. After focused actions our energy scatters into shimmering heat, a halo of inertia. Life is a circle, and the blues is the more natural way. It flies us back to the past at unexpected moments, drowning our senses in old songs and scents. Traveling distances us from who we’ve become, but remembrances out of nowhere remind us of where we came from. We’ve talked about this and, thankfully, you are patient with my dreary ramblings on the whys and wherefores, while I could listen to your saucy stories all day long. You, who won’t stop with the yardwork despite creaky knees, who has your blood pressure taken at the fire department purposely to catch a glimpse of the hotsy-totsy new fireman. Who can we vent with but each other? I will give you this lovely cup soon as I can get outside again, when the whistling hawks migrate south, and I can breathe.

Susan DeFelice

Image: Muzammil, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons – a shelf of Mexican pottery with painted mugs and cups.