Characterization

When I was a child, I thought she was a witch. I was not a mean child, I was simply prone to believing what I saw with my own two eyes, and what I saw told me that my great aunt was a witch. She lived in a tumble down shack she built mostly by herself in my family’s pecan grove overlooking the lake filled by the muddy Mississippi. The shack was covered in kudzu and I have to imagine that the stray cats guarding it were only outnumbered by the termites living inside the rotting cypress walls. When we would play in the front yard of Granny’s house we would sometimes get too close to her shack and she would lean her hunched, wrinkled frame out the window, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, and cry out to us, “If one of y’all sends that football through my stained glass, I’ll put all your dirty faces on my dolls.” All of us kids knew that her “dolls” were VooDoo dolls, procured from the big city of New Orleans. This vague, empty threat, when repeated enough times, was plenty for my eight year old brain to pair it with her army of stray cats and decide that she was of the broomstick-riding variety. To say that my cousins and I avoided her is an understatement. As an adult, I realize that she is no witch at all. In fact, she is a poet whose lovely flowing lines about life reek of someone who’s seen a lot of it. And she has. Most of life has treated her poorly. Divorced from an abusive husband, runaway children, drug-addicted grandchildren, you know, the works. This broken life has led her to shield herself from the world behind her rotting, cypress walls smoking Marlboro’s, drinking Corona’s, and writing lyrical poetry. She doesn’t have many years left on this cruel planet and all she wants out of those years is peace, and for her unruly great nieces and nephews to not throw a football through her windows.