Remember the water, the bowl-like silver mess cup. One good, one licked in thick black from using it over the gas stove. The well, where you had to everything but keep your eyes closed...the sun so bright, glinting off the well water, glinting off the water in the bag, glinting off the water as it splashed over crimson-black skin. How good it tasted, right after you hauled it up in your dusty rubber bag with the too-thick new rope. Luke warm, clean, sweet. But still a touch colder than the air. I never did get brave enough to bathe in front of all those women. Fatou. And her baby, Ibu.
Ramadan. Drowning in a pool of my own sweat on my modest bed. Seething in and out of lucidness. Having my soul spill out, into God, mingling with the people around me. Like the heat waves, creeping over and into everyone, and everything. And then those two full cups of water, at sundown, after sweet bread and coffee. How close to heaven they were. The best thing I've ever consumed.
And just the ordinary days, out for a long walk, talking myself dry, and coming into my cool shaded room, dipping the cup into the clay pot, and drinking with no thought. Water was plentiful, thanks to my ancienne at least.
Water is what I need now. Not coffee, not sugar, soda, bags of treats eaten in a day. My tounge, my throat, my lungs, belly, cells even, long for water. Long for those hot days where every cell in my body was exhausted. Now I drink from a Poland Spring disposable sippy bottle, and throw it in the trash. Perhaps the woman who cleans it out knows the ways of my former life.
I hate old people. And not the kind that are hard and gnarled but the kind that are soft and puckered. My Aunt Ida is 100 years old. Her fingers turn at 45 degree angles from their origins. She is knotted and grey. But she still cooks for herself every day. She doesn't take any pills. She goes to church, and foodshopping. She doesn't complain, even though, as we helped her into her chair, and took off her shoes, I noticed her toes too go at 45 degree angles. "They're bothering her," Aunt Lorraine said. But you would never know.
Or Mam Sagar. Gnarly old woman is she. Mouth like a spit fire, like a flaming dragon angry at every turn. She spurts it out to each kid who crosses her path. She breathes flames over the chores the older ones "make" her do. To the poor job the wives do on tasks she used to do a hundred years ago, in harsher conditions. Walking seven miles with a basin on her head, from when the sun hits the zenith until it sets. However many trips the better. She rubs her knees every night. Arthritis racks her whole body. All the old joints. Mam Maru was up every morning before anyone else. Walking buckets of water to her exquisite garden with her bare feet, stiff like planks. She told me, if she didn't move all day, well then she'd just be sitting in her chair, hurting.
But women here, fat Americans, who sit down at the first sign of aches and pains, and point their gnarled finger (the only thing) at the younger ones to get this, get that. Women who give up the only gift that God has gave them...a body through which to interact with the world. Lungs to sense if the cold air is moist or dry, and what pollutions in it. Hands to put lotion on, to play with hair, to work through grains. Legs to strain against the hill, to burn from repitition, to carry you until they're numb and you are just a walking cloud. A heart, to beat so fast that blood is rushing through your body and it dissolves you into a sea of oxygen. God gave us a soul, yes, but a soul is nothing without a body to act it out. A painter that holds the brush is not a painter at all.