A Sweet Face to Go With All That Sugar Cane

I had just emptied the urine out of the potty chair onto the sandy parking lot. Nobody noticed. It soaked in pretty quickly, leaving an inconspicuous little puddle. I’ve got that sweet sort of look about my face that everyone always thinks nice things about. Someone could have seen me with potty chair in hand and thought, “How nice, she’s watering the plants.”

A few years ago I smuggled tulip bulbs in from Amsterdam. Silly me, not paying any attention to the rules until the flight attendant made some announcement. My suitcase set off the alarm at the Atlanta airport, and the guard asked me if I had something I shouldn’t. I told him no. He looked at my face for an instant before letting me pass. It’s just that sort of a face.

Sweet palms, palms, and more palms. I love palms.

Since the potty was empty, we went tromping through the woods. I pointed out the black scars where a forest fire had lapped at the papery bark of the pine trees. The boy took a sample of black bark home, shoving it in my purse. Young palmettos were sprouting up everywhere, reincarnated from their roots. Palmettos burn like paper.

The wind was heavy, swaying the branches high above us, against that blue, blue, blue sky. So gorgeously blue. The blue is one of my favorite things about winter—most days are crispy cool with that sparkling blue.

The sort of blue you can fall into.

It is interesting to me how humans naturally look to cultivate nature without even trying. A moss covered log looks like a carpeted bench; a grape vine is a handy climbing rope; wide oak branches are the potential for a second-story living room; a fat stump is a convenient step stool.

We reached the end of the trail, where the ruins loomed. The tot took one look at the crumbling rock walls and chimneys, and instead decided that the moss covered stones at its boarder were much more important. They called to her, asking her to walk them, so we did. People in a camper nearby nodded at me, smiles spread across their faces—because I’ve got that kind of face.

Once the moss covered stones knew our footsteps, we walked through the ruins after all. The boy read me every sign explaining the process of extracting sugar cane. The crumbling chimney of the sugar cane factory stood before us, the sweet molasses aroma having faded away two hundred years ago when the Seminoles burned it. Have you tasted pure sugar cane?

See where I got the inspiration for my dream? These nightmare creatures are everywhere...

I have. Fast forward about two hours. A long metal arm of a press was spinning over our heads, as the hard stalk of sugar cane was smashed beneath it. The thin, beige liquid came trickling out the side, into a vat. A man stepped forward, offering me a cup, because I’ve got that kind of face—I look like such a nice person. My husband said he got cavities from sucking on a piece of sugar cane too much as a kid growing up in Brazil. To us natural born Americans, with tongues indoctrinated by hefty doses of sugar from infancy, it didn’t taste as sweet to me as the Halloween candy sitting in the dining room.

We moved on. I sat on a rusty folding chair in the back of a barn that was as I old as I am. Older, antique pulleys and a display of antiquated styles of barbed wire hung to my right. The children skittered around, playing their own variety of musical chairs to the bluegrass music played toward the front of the barn. Sunlight played off the children, flickering in the moving branches of the oak trees. The older man in the baseball cap with the harmonica smiled at me—I’m just that sort of person.

A boy in the sunlight with his stick.

Society’s expectations have a way of creating reality. The nicer people think I am, the nicer I become.

I need to figure out how to build a big spinning arm press to turn the patch of cane I’ve got out by the garden into sugar. Maybe I will work on the bowl of Halloween candy first.