I Used to Call Her Mommy

On cold mornings I helped my grandmother feed the yawning mouth of a Warm Morning stove with shiny black lump-coal.  The smell was inebriating.  I can't do better than this to describe the effect it had on my conscious body, both now, and especially then, when I was a little boy set loose on the side of Wiley Arms Mountain, above Wartburg, Tennessee, where I fell in love with aunt Betty Lou, and uncles, Billy Joe, John Paul, Ralph and especially Tom and Tim.

The olfaction would tease a place in me that gets little attention anymore, aside from these memories of my strange, coaly affection, and the looping echo of the pedal steel guitar rising from Cline Bunch's juke box inside the Mountain View Inn, where I learned later on about Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and pinball and nine-ball and straight pool.

This song haunts me like that Appalachian coal smoke.  It worms its way down into my tender solar region, where my saltwater tears continue to be distilled in the fresh headwaters from the haunted hollows of Gobey.

When I study my creek bank of old images I can see Mary Sue hiding in the corn.  I can see the hem of her homemade skirt dragging the top of the water behind the laurels as she searches the slick  rocks for mudpuppies and waterdogs. She and I would flee the hollow and make our way to Chattanooga, where I would emerge and call Mary Sue my Mommy.