Ya-Ya Sisters
April 29, 2010 in Brunswick GA, Coastal Georgia, Fun, Golden Isles, Sitting on my La-La, So Belle Ya-Ya Sisterhood, St. Simons Island GA, This and That, waiting for my Ya-Ya, Ya-Ya
re-run
- Rebecca Wells (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood)
- I try to believe,” she said, “that God doesn’t give you more than one little piece of the story at once. You know, the story of your life. Otherwise your heart would crack wider than you could handle. He only cracks it enough so you can still walk, like someone wearing a cast. But you’ve still got a crack running up your side, big enough for a sapling to grow out of. Only no one sees it. Nobody sees it. Everybody thinks you’re one whole piece, and so they treat you maybe not so gentle as they could see that crack.”
- “She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the girliness of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words ‘time management’ out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down the unchartered beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell.”
- She used to say she could taste sleep and that it was as delicious as a BLT on fresh French bread.”
- “What does my smile look like now? Vivi wondered. Can you reclaim that free-girl smile, or is it like virginity- once you loose it
- “life is short but it is wide. this too shall pass.”
- “But all she wanted to do was lie in bed, eat Kraft macaroni and cheese, and hide from the alligators.”
- “His tall, lanky body had the wrinkles of sleep, and he smelled like cotton and dreams.”
- “… a full moon shimmered over central Louisiana. This was no rinky-dink moon. This was a moon you had to curtsy to. A big, heavy, mysterious, beautiful, bossy moon. The kind you want to serve things to on a silver platter.
- “The soft aroma of old worn cotton from a linen chest, the lingering smell of tobacco on an angora sweater; Jergen’s hand lotion, sauteed green peppers and onions; the sweet, nutty smell of peanut butter and bananas, the oaken smell of good bourbon. A combination of lily of the valley, cedar, vanilla, and somewhere, the lingering of old rose. These smells are older than any thought. Mama, Teensy, Neecie, and Caro, each one of them had an individual scent, to be sure. But this is the Gumbo of their scents. This is the Gumbo Ya-Ya. This is the internal vial of perfume I carry with me everywhere I go.
- “Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only knew the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother.
- “She walks barefoot into the humid night, moonlight on her freckled shoulders. Near a huge, live oak tree on the edge of her father’s cotton fields, Sidda looks up into the sky. In the crook of the crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful heart. She kicks her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted an old buddy.
- Sidda stands in the moonlight and lets the Blessed Mother love every hair on her six-year-old head. Tenderness flows down from the moon and up from the earth. For one fleeting, luminous moment, Sidda Walker knows there has never been a time when she has not been loved.
- “True love is not a crock, but patriotism is.”
- “She leaned down and smelled the skin at Connor’s shoulders right at the spots where, as Martha Graham might have said, his own wings might have been attached.”
- “Sidda sank down into the wide flannel embrace of their bodies, and she rested. For a moment she died a little death, they died it together.”
- “The notes danced through the June air; Vivi could feel them dust her hair and shoulders. She could feel the notes enter her and settle deep into her bones.”
- “Say there is no truth. Say there are only scraps that we feebly try to sew together.”
- “Our Lady of Cheribim Chit-Chat.”
- “In the crook of the crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful heart. She kicks her her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted an old buddy.
- “A scent that disturbs me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet and something else- something spicy almost biting and exotic.”
- “Shep claimed eating cake like that so early in the morning was a ‘whore’s breakfast.’ The rest of them didn’t care. They were happy little whores who didn’t worry about saving a morsel. “
