Mud Soup

It began with love:

The silver ladle is submerged in a soupy mixture the color of my grandfather’s hands after he mixes his homemade fertilizer for his garden. My hands were small and struggled to stir the goop that had settled to the bottom of the “pot”, a left over yogurt container that my grandparents reused after they have finished off the last of it.

I remember the previous morning when my grandmother handed my grandfather the oversized tablespoon thick with the white substance. He dabbed a bit of honey from the teddy bear shaped bottle onto the spoon, tarnishing the bright white yogurt with a blip of gold, inspected it, then slid the utensil into his mouth, cleaning off the spoon with one swipe. Flecks of yogurt and honey stuck to his grey whiskers and my grandmother, with her throaty giggle, swiped at her own upper lip with her index finger.

“Grandpa, saving some for later?” Her eyes crinkle as she half smiles.

“Of course I am. Because I knew you’d want some later.” He doesn’t skip a beat and my grandmother leans over and kisses him fast and hard, a love peck she calls it.

“Yum.”

I was caught up in them as a child, their unabashed desire for each other.

I looked back at the yogurt cup where drips of the mixture have sloshed over the sides and left brown trails down the sides of the container, thinking of the specks of yogurt in my grandfather’s beard. Sitting with my legs tucked under me, my nightshirt scrunched up to my knees, I stared into the murky confection. Something was missing. The morning dew had left the edges of my nightshirt damp and it stuck to my bare legs when I stood up. Blades of unruly grass clung between my toes and the tops of my feet as I searched the yard for my next ingredient.

-*

“I could care less about naked men.” My grandmother shrugs next to me on the robins egg blue couch, pausing after to wink at my grandfather who is seated just across the room. She turns to me again.

“I’ve seen so many of those things dangling between men’s legs it’s absurd.” She giggled like I used to when I talked about sex when I was in middle school. Her girlishness has emerged over the years. Her body wrinkles and bends with time but her soul grow young and supple, vivacious. I see it in her eyes when she looks at my grandfather. Their love comes from a place that most people cannot discover, and if they do they are shut out from it, haven’t earned entrance. They have silent conversations that no one else can hear, but I can see it playing out between them. The way their touches and caresses are so subtle that you would miss them if you blinked,

“Grandma! Too much! Even I haven’t seen my share of them.” My face grows hot with flush and I concentrate on my bare feet. I wonder why I am embarrassed to talk about this with my family. Hushed I add “By choice. Those dangling things intimidate me.” My laugh swallows the end of my sentence. She pats my thigh, her collection of thin silver bracelets shimmying with the movement.

“Don’t rush it. Let me tell you, when God made men he did not have beauty in mind when he created their…” she clears her throat, “paraphernalia.” She looks at my grandfather again. He catches her eye and I watched them share an intimate smile, full of experience and remembrance of nights when they laid wrapped around each other.

It wasn’t until I eased out of my teenage years that I began to notice the way they lived within each other. I like to think I’m the only one who catches their insinuations. How my grandfather, on the way to Starbucks this past Christmas, slid his hand along the leather interior of my fathers car and hooked his thick index finger under my grandmothers first three delicate knuckles, rubbing the pearly knobs of her arthritic joints, willing relief into them. Her hands always seem to flow more steadily after his touch. I watched them in the review mirror in the backseat that day because they insisted on sitting next to each other, even if it meant scrunching themselves into a less spacious automobile. I hope they saw me watching.

-*

I grew up spending long days stretched into evenings at my grandparents house while my parents filled the hours of their day with work and wages to keep us buoyant. Growing older, its become less and less a priority to keep in contact with them, something that weighs heavy in the confines of my stomach each time we visit a few times a year. To have lived only minutes from my grandparents as a child was a luxury, but now it’s become difficult for me to remember that until I see them.

The puffed kernels of my grandmother's homemade popcorn disappeared by the millisecond in the middle of my tongue, melting away into a brine of salt and oil leaving behind an afterthought of cinnamon and sugar. Popcorn nights only come to me in the context of scorched summer days cooled into nights that left a chill on the top of my bare feet. After dinner dishes were left soaking in mountains of suds the ritual began. I sat patiently on the tweed couch and pretended to immerse myself in the latest coloring book. My grandmother sat with a pile of yarn at her feet and crochet needles working finger eights between her nimble, curved fingers, fabricating what ever blanket, hat or pair of slippers she may have been working on for the coming fall and winter. Enough time passed where dinner was only a distant memory on our taste buds. By the time my stomach gurgled, she had disappeared into the kitchen, abandoning her needles in the rocking chair.

A sound like some exotic tribal maraca ensued from the kitchen and I have no proof, I can picture my grandmother taking extra effort to swish the raw corn kernels around in the container. Maybe she turned it upside down then back up again to make the kernels slide and ping against the glass jar and metal lid. I scampered into the kitchen where she was waiting with a giant plastic bowl and a jar half full with golden, teardrop kernels.

“Ready to wake up Grandpa?” Her smile was mischievous and alluring, her collection of silver bracelets shimmying on her strong wrists, accentuated with lean muscle as she popped the metal lid from the container after I failed to unscrew it myself. My little hands and arms were too weak to release the kernels.

She was, and still is, beautiful like an antique piece of jewelry. Skin with a dull sheen in the muted light of their home reminded me of the way the sky burnishes just after the sun sets and her scent was a mixture of salt, lavender and rainwater. The way my grandfather would look at her as he made his way into the kitchen was one of longing, as if he knew he had all of her but all was not enough, as if he wanted nothing but to absorb her into his pores so when he worked in the yard the next morning, she would flow from his pours as he perspired. His love for her is consuming.

The jar of kernels was awkward in my grasp, but somehow I managed to pour just enough into the bowl with only a few escaping and bouncing onto the counter like golden hail. Placing a lid over the bowl I inserted it into the microwave, punching 3 minutes for good measure. While the microwave whirred, my grandmother pulled a bottle of thick, golden oil from the cupboard above our heads with on hand and turn on the front burner on the stove next to us with the other. As the coils began to turn from black to fuchsia my grandfather slinked up behind her and placed his chin on top of her head, tilting his nose into her gray-white hair, his chest rising into her back as he inhaled her scent into him. Grandma reached around to find his hands and encircled her waist with his arms, guiding his palms to her belly. But her attention could always be in two places at once.

“Sugar and cinnamon today, Hal?”