Sue

Strange Appalachian concoctions born from deep poverty combined with genetic dumb luck pulled her up to the American stage. She laughed much later while telling AIDS jokes as her son's best friend succombed to its serial horrors, designing dinner presentations to nourish those bodies of her immediates that she sometimes loved unimaginably. I was told how she walked to the creek with her most beloved son and flipped rocks for crustacians and amphibians in summer below the covered bridge at Bawcress Farm like she did before being called up from the rusty junk dumped by hollowbillies back home. She deeply and differently loved and despised all but one or two of her immediates, declaring once, "be careful Greg, he's a good shot," but wanted the absolute best for them all with little regard for the hierarchy she created over time. All things to all people she was. But many of those things were soaked in sincere affection for the lucky ones who held her acute attention at the time. And all the while, she was constantly on the run, like the terrified bats out of hell, from brown eggs and the waft of warm morning coal from the front room back home that she hated until she went back to visit.