Bev Ellington

Her coffee cups had lipstick stains even after washing. Grownups around her breakfast table talked politics and prejudice, smoked filled the room like a pub, her guttural laugh was a machine gun, hair twisted into a falling down bun, strands stiff like stems, bobby pins unleashed in the wind blew blue Jubilee Gem; basket of flowers.      She was a conversationalist. Her house was pink stucco when stucco wasn’t in style yet. She painted the still life of orange Pawnee fields, summer time hues in grey streams. I ran my hand against the bumps of her paintings once to feel the Lungworts, Larkspur, Cornflower spikes, I could’ve picked them like scabs.      She was an artist. In a June Cleaver white-belted dress hair still a mess, she played Boogie Woogie blues, Floyd Cramer’s slip notes, her legs danced in flat shoes, lips spread across her teeth as far back as they could reach.      She played the piano. Horses in the barn, cows in the mud patties, boisterous blooms grew in moonlit pasture hallucinations, beam-cast rainbows caked her face when she waved goodbyes.      She had two sons.   Glenn and Billy Jo were swatted when they didn’t lock the gate! lower the cattle guards! shut the shed door! always had that fly swatter in her hand, electrifying our indigo meadow.      She was the wildflower heads I plucked. .