Betty Branch catalog (6-21-23)) - Flipbook - Page 44
Skinny Braids and All
These brown braids (not French braided — that would have been lovely) tiny skimpy braids,
trapped forehead hairs, pulled back to feed only slightly larger “plaits,” the ends pinioned
to the child’s head.
Tubby, and in that way, big enough to wear her mother’s blouse or sweater, feelings mixed —
proud identification with the idea of “mother,” pain at her own reality
unformed, formless in her mother’s clothes, smelling her mother’s smell.
Resentments, hard, heavy memories entrap her in that place called “home.”
Mother’s rage fills the small memory space.
The child-woman slips out of her window at 16 . . . late at night . . . loves
The danger of the brewing storm . . . thrills to jagged edged lightning . . . dances in the dark.
Back . . . back to childhood in West Virginia...
The rust colored sulphur creek (locals said “crick,” she never did) drew her like a magnet.
Dry in the heat, it roared yellow cream froth after a rain and stained the rocks red like the water.
As she nailed together a rude raft for escape,
She imagined it was her own blood that stained the water and the rocks.
The raft was a lifeboat out of “here” . . . away from the futility of pleasing the angry mother,
Of knowing the shadow father . . . into fantasy.
“Hold still, you little devil, I hate you,“ my mother says,
As she jerks back the forehead hairs into skinny braids.
Betty Branch, 1984
Birth Journey
A travel back in time — 3 days in West Virginia
retracing the path Claude & Judy took and my entry into
the world and that place. The hospital in Winchester
still stands — the West VA Turnpike my Dad worked on
as a foreman, the orchards — famous for apples,
still these many years, full and beautiful.
As I head away from Winchester toward the
Capon River, I try to sort the meager information Judy
had been willing to share, sort it with stories I only
half-listened to growing up. Now those scraps are my map
for discovering my very beginning — brought into focus by
the birth of my first grandchild.
Betty Branch, 1990
42
