transient

huge, fluffed flakes in a transient blizzard

flung against the windshield

of my daughter’s car as she gave me her

warm vest to take me home from the hospital

after staying with me for hours when

when i could not find the words to speak

meteorologists had promised again and again

for weeks, but still the snow did not lie or

stay, only promise, threaten and show before

leaving with a taste of disaster to be heeded

frank

deciding to be frank

when all subtle clues escape notice

i have privately warned the offender

that tolerance will no longer be gifted

warning in the early pages of Exhalation

Is this helpful as a warning in the early pages of my newest novel,  EXHALATION?

The NANDRIA Series has been my attempt to capture characters from the 1940s and early 1950s that created my world and my assumptions about what was valuable and who was not. As a child, i heard, and maybe repeated, words like colored, pickaninny, jigaboo, darky, coon, spade and spook if not niglet, bootlip, burrhead and monkey. I did not know they were slurs, but the Black people around me heard and knew the humiliation that these words and others were meant to deliver. I held so many assumptions i now know were invalid, but which i understood as the way the world was. Being family, i love both sides. It is my hope that these stories may give insight into the foibles and fears of each of us. Perhaps we may see each other as humanly vulnerable rather than evil.