Frostings of Sweat and Sweet Talcum

"Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum." ~~Harper Lee, from "To Kill A Mockingbird" (chapter one)

I love this description of hot summers in the South. When I read it I can actually smell the lightly scented, loose face powder my mother has always used. 

The first time I read To Kill A Mockingbird was long before I was married. When I read it years later with Eler Beth there were words and phrases that held new meanings for me. Thomas is originally from Alabama, and some of his stories about his childhood before moving up North included words and phrases I'd never heard before. So when I read this with Eler Beth, the first time I'd read it since being married, "teacakes," and, later in the same chapter, "chinaberry tree" meant something to me.

The first time I made Thomas my Mom's recipe for home made, from-scratch, cookies -- what we always just called "scratch" cookies -- Thomas saw me taking them off the cookie sheet and putting them on a plate and said, "Hey! Teacakes!" I thought that was charming. It evoked an image of ladies in Victorian lace, sipping tea, and choosing small sugared or iced "cakes" from a tray. 

Now what I'd made were just simple cookies. They were butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, and milk, mixed into a thick dough, rolled out, and cut with a round cookie-cutter. They had no decorations, no frosting, nothing. They just tasted really, really good. But Thomas said that when he was a child, sweets that looked exactly like those cookies were always called "teacakes." Sometimes they were plain, and sometimes they were frosted, but they were "teacakes." And he still calls my cookies "teacakes" to this day. 

Before when I'd read this book I'd pictured "teacakes" as being actual cakes, but Thomas said no, cakes were cakes, but the small ones, like my cookies, were "teacakes." Anyway, when I read this with Eler Beth the words jumped out at me and made me smile; made me remember the circumstances of the conversation Thomas and I had had about "teacakes" that long-ago day.

And before when Scout mentioned a chinaberry tree it didn't make me wonder what kind of tree that was, but when I read it with Eler Beth I knew what a chinaberry tree was because there had been one in Thomas' yard when he was little.

So this is a favorite sentence for me because I think it is beautiful imagery and because it makes me smile and remember.

Keep On Nodding Terms

"I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not." ~~~ Joan Didian in her essay  "On Keeping A Notebook"


This is from an essay by Joan Didian, a novelist and essayist whom I greatly admire. 

My favorite lines from this essay actually make up two sentences:

"I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not.  Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

"On Keeping A Notebook" (from the 1968 anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem) is probably my favorite of her essays, and I love this sentence. I think it is true of most people that the older we get the more people we realize we have been. Sometimes we like to forget them, and sometimes we wish other people would remember them more often. Sometimes we have moved on to the next personification of ourselves and don't even realize it for a while. Sometimes there has been something in our past, perhaps tragic or emotionally debilitating, that we can't or don't want to remember, but that has shaped us into who we are. Sometimes it's the simple, happy child who existed in the past and who seems to be harder to conjure up as we go along.

I love the way she expresses her thought with the phrase "keep on nodding terms." We don't need to wallow in the despairs of the past. We don't need to yearn for the delights of the past. But it is probably healthy to at least be on nodding terms with it.