Dear Janesy, I have enclosed a photo of our old homestead, now yours. I know you will think I have left you nothing but a money pit – a pile of debris, on land that may seem cursed, spurned for decades by God and Nature alike, and then … well, the terrible fire that ended everything, or most things. As for me, I go on. I know you will think either that I must hate you, or that I must be laughing at you from the Great Beyond, to have left you such a thing. But I know, too, that you will not resell it or walk away, abandoning it to time and weather, as others might have done. …
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wild persimmons
For me persimmons have always been a marker, a sign that it’s finally Fall. There are two persimmon trees on my parent’s farm and, growing up, I loved their short-lived fruit. Like blackberries in the Spring, the fruit seemed to appear overnight, take forever to ripen, and then disappear just as quickly, rotting in the sun or picked away by animals. But there was a moment of luscious, juicy fruit. And that moment was when the relentless Texas Summer had finally softened, when school had been dragging on for months, when Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were in sight.
Cake had never met his father. He had lived with his mother, Celestina, in the same two-bedroom apartment all his life. Cake called it their layer. It was the fifth level of a five-story building on 9th Avenue and Carson Street. His grandparents, who owned the building, lived just beneath Cake and Cele on layer four, and his auntie and cousins were beneath them on layer three. The rest of the building, which included a second layer, a first layer, and a basement, was taken up by the family bakery. Cake was nearly sixteen and only his family still called him by his real name, Javier. His friends had called him Cake for so long that he thought of himself as Cake, too.…
“No, I don’t like work, I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what is on the work — the chance to find yourself. Your own reality — for yourself, not for others — what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it really means.”
~Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
