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shadows lean on me breathing rotting potatoes as I hurry past the stout-armed furnace where firelight plays on the cement, dodging under the line where Dad’s overalls drip, past his workbench and power tools, into the fruit cellar.
    I love the bright jars, golden peaches, buff pears, dark berries, the quarts of tomato juice, the half-pints of strawberry and raspberry jam, although I hate the season when I help Mother put them up. Superimposed images. September is my season for canning peaches. I like putting up the fruit I grow. I become my mother in joy. After thirty her strengths and virtues began to bloom in me, her dislike of waste, her witch’s way with plants and birds and furry animals, her respect for sunlight and clean water and soil built well with compost.
    Dad’s Christmas bottle of Old Grand Dad is hidden by a row of home-canned tomatoes. The damp creeps along my arms, seeks the neck of my sweater. Taking care not to disturb the dust I pour an inch in my tumbler, return the bottle, return the tomato pints to their circles on the newspaper-covered shelf, return myself tumbler in hand fleeing the shadows upstairs.
    I loll on the bumpy rust-colored couch that fills one wall, sipping my prize and contemplating whether or not to turn on the TV. In the curve of gradual acquisition of TVs on our block, we were average. I was in the ninth grade. Had we gotten it earlier, I am convinced I would not have become a compulsive reader and thus the ability to study my way out of here would have been closed to me. At first we watched every night, but now it is theirs and I am grateful to it for occupying them while I steal away into my privacy. Still I have warm memories. During the Kefauver hearings my besotted mother let me stay home from school pretending the flu during the best parts so we could watch together, mesmerized. “Not that the businessmen aren’t just as big crooks,” she reminded me. “And the senators are all in their pockets. All riches are robbery.” But she couldn’t resist the spectacle. Our last period of passionate rapprochement was during the recent trial of the Rosenbergs. That scared my mother. We never spoke of it in front of Dad. We didn’t fight even about the books I read and I stayed downstairs in the evenings. We are sure they will be pardoned, still. They cannot kill a mother with children over some nonsense with matchboxes. Dad does not suspect how much radical identification she has passed on. Not that she can argue a political position, but the passion and loyalty she has given I can attach to a base of reading and observation. Logic I learned from him. You have to argue a case if you want anything out of him, unless you proceed by indirection, as she always does.
    Small room with aqua walls bedizened with pictures of snow-capped mountains, with plaques of grapes (including the one I was painting at day care when the Detroit race riots came into our neighborhood), with hanging begonias in planters shaped like puppies. The tormented pattern of the rug struggles between runners of green and brown put down where it has worn. Two corners are hung with knickknack shelves of huddled china giraffes and elephants, gilded cups and saucers, wigwams, souvenirs of Mackinac Island, the Blue Hole, the Wisconsin Dells.
    I march to the radio and turn on one of the benefits of Detroit, the CBC that pumps real music at me. This time I make it loud so it fills the house, an aquarium of music where I rise and sink, suddenly graceful. I leap and twirl and prance and kick until the music stops and I drop in a heap on the floor looking at the raw underside of the table. The edge of the tablecloth Buhbe crocheted hangs down all around. Would she still love me? Or would she judge me nasty as Mother does? Warm cinnamon lap, tales told all different from the way Mother told them, like turning the figures in a photograph around and seeing their backsides.
    Slow and romantic violin. I dance but I am longing for