Green Lacy Stars

By Judy Light Ayyildiz

Early March, and I'm out running errands in a spring sunshine that makes me take off my sweater. I go to the plastic surgeon to check the skin on my nose-is it a freckle or is there a change in the cells, and what should I do about the age spot on my cheek? I don't mind the blotches scattered now like brown leaves blown across the tops of my hands because they remind me of Mama's-gone now almost five years.

With a new skin care program and a good report about my nose, I head off to Mill Mountain Theater to pick up submissions to read for the New Play Festival. In ten minutes, I veer back out, my arms loaded with six packets. On the way to the car, I pass by the stalls of flowers, and decide to turn the corner and have a look at the Farmers Market. There's not a lot on the long row of tables today, but after all, it's only Tuesday and too early for much local produce to be coming in, so I quickly move down the street, scanning the assortment on the stalls as I go. At one table, I almost buy for ten bucks a handmade and decorated wooden rabbit. The toothy thing is fetching and almost as tall as my five-year-old grandson, but I don't want to lug it around today. Besides, "Bunny Day" is still a month away. Not a bad idea for a gift. The grandkid would do better by that than a basket of candy. As I envision his face when we find the perfect spot for the rabbit, I know I'll be back for it.

I turn to retrace my steps to the dark purple pansies, knowing that they will look like velvet on my patio and be tough enough to withstand a few more cold spells once this weather's tease is past. Then-there at the side of the Bent Mountain cabbage and thick tongues of spinach just picked this morning is a tin bucket piled to the brim with creasys, the green lacy stars in the fields of my childhood. I pluck a cluster by one strand and study on it. "They're good for you," the man in the overalls says. He probably thinks a city girl like me doesn't know what to do with it. "Oh yeah," I answer, "when I was a girl of six or eight, I thought we ate poor people's food-stuff like beech nuts, huckleberries, pinto beans, and creasy greens. Years later, I found out that we were picking health food."

Maybe it is the balmy sun or the bit of the wild fields dangling from my fingers like a frowzy wig, but my senses float back to West Virginia, across a damp meadow where I hunted-like Easter eggs-the creasys. Mama's rich red hair glows in the spring sun. She's off a ways from me. Both of us fill paper pokes. In rhythm, we stoop. She has taught me how to cut off the tender doily greens just above the roots. We are harvesting together. Mama and me will later wash our greens, tops and bottoms, until all the dirt and beads of mud are gone; and then, for supper, she'll boil them down with bacon. There, in the meadow, I mimic how she methodically clutches, pulls, and collects. Mama's hands are waitress's hands. Her fingers splayed, they are trays that can tote three glasses at once. On this afternoon, her freckled fingers have demonstrated how to carry a sharp tool. I'm careful to hold the point away from me as I work. Mama believes that I have the sense I was born with. Anyway, I am too used to West Virginia's rocks and holes in the ground to trip. She has entrusted me with one of her good paring knives. She is not worried that I can't handle this task.

"Shall I weigh you out a mess?" the man asks. I suck in that soft red and green and yellow of fifty years ago. No use to waste energy wishing on what won't come round again. I nod to the farmer and buy the greens. Moving on, I greedily load up a box of pansies too, and wobble off toward my car, careful not to stumble with my loot. I'll cook the creasys minus the fat. It doesn't matter if I add the bacon or not. Her methods never turn out quite the same in my hands-but they're as close as I can get.

Judy Light Ayyildiz is a well-published poet and poetry textbook writer living in Roanoke, Virginia.