Against the Gentle Current

We were young in those summers. Our grandfather was our guide, our caretaker, our protector and my childhood mentor. The summers in the deserts of Arizona were hot and exhausting. We were drawn to the shade… to the air conditioning, to the early mornings and to the welcome sunsets.

My grandfather held my hand while we walked together. He would take me into the arid farmland that surrounded the oasis of his family homestead. His mother, my great-grandmother, raised her family amongst the hustle and bustle of a restaurant and desert gas station. The large, overhanging tin front-drive still echoed the activities that I can see in yellowing black and white photographs… photographs filled with staring family members dressed in suits and straw hats. The men stood stiff next to female relatives… posing near towering cacti or dusty old sedans.

His hands were soft to the touch. Years of working in his restaurant, decades of hand washing and food preparation and serving drinks inside of the roadside Cosmo Café had protected them from the elements. His fingernails were thick and smooth. I would rub my fingers across the flat surface of his nails as he talked to me… I would watch his hands holding his reading glasses. He would close them onto each other and open them up with his thumb. It was a smooth rhythm… entrancing.

I would watch him ready himself for a mid-day nap. He would read any number of paper backed books that could be found in small domino-like piles throughout the house. When he took his glasses off, he would lay his head back and turn his hand over his head… touching his middle finger between his eyes and spreading the other fingers across his forehead. It was always the same…

We would walk to the irrigation ditches that lined the hundreds of acres of cotton fields like the roads of a cityscape. The skies were a piercing sea of blue, dotted with an occasional solitary cloud. The mountains that surrounded the Gila Valley would echo the faint hum of diesel engines that pushed the rolling waters of life from deep wells into the desert. We could hear the quiet clapping of the moving water as it made its way through the V shaped ditches. There was a distinctive aroma in the air of water and the wet desert soil.

He would hold my hand to help me into the cool moving water. The sandy soil would give way under my weight as I slid down the embankment into the water. The pitted concrete was alive with algae that held firmly onto its walls... I would pull at it with my fingers to expose the dark concrete below. There were no toys or floats… no slides or colorful distractions. There was just the relief from the summer heat. Grandfather kept a lookout for animals or snakes that may have made their way into the water… we always kept our eyes focused against the gentle current.

The summer sun would quickly dry our clothes on the way back home. He would scruff up my moppy hair and pat me as only a Grandfather can. I would take his hand and ask him to promise to take me swimming again… the answer was always a resounding yes…

                                                          Shannon R Killman