Coda PETER FRIEDERICI
long returns
TAKE IT AS A deposit in the bank of long returns, or as an exchange in a drawn-out conversation we
hold with the children of people who have
not yet been born: my five-year-old son,
sedulously plunging his hands into a big
bowlful of what we call blue corn kernels
(even though they aren’t quite blue) that
my wife and I have laboriously been removing from their cobs, incautiously
spills a passel of seeds into the crack at the
back of the new easy chair, and when I try
to remove them they slip down into the
slick imitation-leather crevice and are
lost forever, for it’s a cut-rate chair from
China that we bought on deep discount
from World Market, and the cushion can’t
be removed.
No matter. There are lots more cobs,
and lots more kernels, because last spring
we moved a heavy old wooden shed from
a sunny spot behind the garage on our
lot to free up some space for gardening,
and when we dug where it had been we
found some iridescent glass shards and
some marbles from the games of children
whose children, if they live still, are grayed
and stooped and hardly able anymore to
finesse games of dirty knees, and in that
sandy unpracticed soil we worked in some
compost and wood ash until, on a day of
snow flurries in early May, we dropped in
the glossy taciturn seeds in their flush of
colors from almost-black purple to a pale
sunrise pink, doused them with gathered
rainwater, and buried them deep.
autumn sun, and knew they were ready
once our walking among the stalks re-
leased sharp rattlesnake crackles into the
cool October air: twisting o= the cobs, we
peeled o= the crumbling husks and let
them fall into the field to feed next year’s
crop. And now, in deep winter, the bagful
of cobs sits in the living room and is noth-
ing so much as an invitation to friends to
stop by, for even though the body and
mind are already aching for spring and for
returning to the stooped work of garden-
ing and the promise of new life emerging
from the darkness of the soil, there is on
these cold and truncated days at least this
painstaking indoor labor that the hands
can engage in while we exchange our new
year’s wishes, and sometimes when our
wishes sound forced in the face of the
day’s bad news, at least we can think of the
seeds spilled deep under the cushion,
some of them glowing with almost the
same depthless ruby fire as a pomegran-
ate seed, really not blue at all, and at least
we can know that once the chair is old
enough or su;ciently worn out from the
long-ago incessant leaping and tumbling
of a once-five-year-old to make its way into
the back corner of some yard as discarded
furniture does, as a low-rent roost for
young men or chickens or sleeping cats,
or if in some unhoped-for calamity the
roof caves in over time and the piss elms
and creepers wind their way over the half-
standing ruins of the vacant house, at
least the spring’s last snows will be able to
run smoothly down into that seat crevice,
still synthetically slick after all the decades
even as it has accumulated downed leaves
and chicken shit and the windblown detri-
tus of our mountain home, and some
wondering child of the children of people
who have not yet been born might stare,
wide-eyed, at the new green shoots of an-
cient corn emerging from their long and
hidden sleep. A
