In the Guadalajara market, I bought a pair of straw espadrilles. When they fell apart months later, I realized the soles were made out of car tires. I fed the tops to a goat at the side of a dusty road. Years later in Friuli near Venice, I bought a pair of velvet espadrilles at the base of the Rialto Bridge. That pair lasted two months longer than the first. I recycled those at our local dump. The boys, both times, didn’t last much longer.
I live in Vermont, surrounded by giant sugar maples and white birch. I kayak nearby with a Blue Heron family and five turtles. My peonies are blooming. It’s cold today when three days earlier it was high in the nineties. I’m wearing a sweater, which I also bought overseas.
My mother always wore espadrilles all summer long. I have her last pair, long past wearing but certainly better made than the two pairs I bought overseas. Just because you’re in a sexy foreign country doesn’t mean the merchandise is sexy even if the guy selling it is. Once, in San Francisco, my sexy boyfriend bought me a gardenia to wear behind my ear. I wore it everyday until it turned brown. When I got home, on my doorstep was a large oval vase with six gardenias floating on top. That boy I lost my virginity to in high school and we’re still friends, unlike the two espadrille boyfriends.
Besides peonies, I also swoon over orange blossoms. I’ve a tall branch of mock orange that comes a close second to the orange blossom grove I rode through on horseback, also overseas, with another boyfriend. It was summer then, in a desert, which enhanced the scent to swooning even more (if you were riding the other horse you would know what I mean). I keep searching for an orange blossom perfume that smells like that evening but they’re all imitations smelling acrid and cheap. The boyfriend was never cheap. He bought me a first edition of my favorite author, Jean Giono, with a woodblock print on the cover of a man shooting a boar with red fire flaring out the muzzle of his long rifle. In the background, a burning hill is ablaze in orange flames with little figures running around, their arms in the air, mouths wide, screaming. But the book doesn’t feel like that to me, more like velvet and peonies.
There’s no way around the past unless you think you’ve owned it which is like saying you have a contract signed with blood and drawn up by the State. My past with these guys is most certainly drawn with blood, thinned out crimson in the regions of my brain. I enjoyed each and every one even if they didn’t work out in the end. There’s no end to blood, or men, or memories, or the past. An ever flowing, changing bloodstream. Impossible to tourniquet, no matter how many sutures.
Dian Parker
Dian Parker’s essays have been published in New Critique, Yolk, Amsterdam Review, 3:AM Magazine, The Rupture, Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Event, among others, and nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She also writes about art for the Observer, ArtNet, and other art publications. www.dianparker.com
