Just The Word Peas \ The Mummichogs

Nancy: When the women gathered to work on the fruits and vegetables to be canned, I often found a place to sit and a way to be part of it.  There wasn’t a lot of money to spend in the ‘30s, but it was the most social time I can remember.

Just The Word Peas

four generations

my mama my granny my mama's

cousin my granny's aunt

and me

sitting in the shade

shelling peas

shelling peas

our hands busy their voices

rising and falling murmur

question and answer

until someone noticed

and everyone noticed

me.   someone said

"little pitchers have big ears"

and for a minute or two

there was only the dozy drowse

of summer

the soft rustle of peas

that summer afternoon

four women

and me

sitting in the shade

living in my memory

five women shelling peas

Alan: Often, walking our lane where it crosses the edge of the marsh, we’ll see a flash and scatter in the brackish pools left behind by the receding tide.  These are mummichogs, tough little fish that thrive at the margins where salinity, oxygen and temperature swing wildly.

The Mummichogs

The mummichogs came up in the small streams.

In the small streams and tide pools

they lingered when the tide went down,

expert hangers-on,

not minding the fresh or the salt.

When the tide went down, they held on

and when the tide returned, they returned

to the sea again for a time

to feed in the salt grasses.

When the tide came up in the streams –

came up farther than before

on the new moons and fulls –

the mummichogs also came up farther

into the pasture

into the woods

and held on.

The tide came up

and the storms pushed it up

and it came up around the knoll where the house once stood

bearing the mummichogs

to a higher home.

The storms came more often now

and they came up farther,

over the knoll and swirling around the backland beyond

and up around the cliffs

the plucked rock faces

from the last glacier

and the very heights of the land

and the mummichogs came up and found

new streams

new pools

new places to feed and breed and hang on.

Where there had been pasture, and woodland, and a house

and cliffs

the mummichogs found new homes

there, after the people and the other land things had gone.

“The Mummichogs” is from a work in progress, Annals Of The Nearer Soon (preliminary title).