Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

Salt of the Earth

41 Salt of the Earth All the way from Spokane to Omaha, meatpacking capital of the nation, I study my legs, tan from laying out in the yard. Before I left, my mother made me apply mustache removal cream, said you can’t meet the colonel looking like that. Someday you’ll be the colonel and I’ll walk around our house in my lingerie, removing every hair from my lip, from the moles that will grow in the corners of my face. When we land, I can’t believe how flat it is here, how you can feel the corn whispering all the way from Iowa where you told me they have manmade lakes, hot mirrors of sun. You said we’d go there, walk across them. Your grandparents tell me your people are the salt of the earth. Clay, pot-bellied pigs squat in their yard. And your father’s third wife likes cows—her kitchen is blackand -white Holsteins on the potholders, the refrigerator magnets, everything chrome. It’s so hot outside the weeds creak but we’re airconditioned , slaked with water 42 poured over ice from the icemaker in the thick glasses the colonel bought. They don’t sweat. At night, I make you break the seal on the windows so we can hear the crickets rubbing their wings together, so we can feel the salt shimmer on our skin. ...