I Felt it in My Blood

By Lennox Shuppe

I remember my great grandmother, Maude, collecting things. She went to flea markets in rural Oklahoma, coming home with little treasures that she squirreled away. Her home smelled of cinnamon, sage, and old books. The ground was neatly swept cement in her tiny little home on the Cherokee reservation. As you walked into her home, you could see shelves all the way up to the ceiling filled with trinkets and figurines. She had bookshelves filled with broken collections of encyclopedias from so many different years, but all of them in alphabetical order. There were jars of old jam and old specimens used as bookends. She had dolls lining the tops of the highest shelves, most of them handmade from thatching and twine with little sewn dresses that reminded me of the ribbon skirts my cousins wore. Underneath that row were collections of silver spoons with little images embedded in the handles, many of them tarnished and brassy from the humid air. She had no air conditioning, or electricity, for that matter. There were candles on the nightstands near her bed and all over the kitchen counter whose light flickered across the faces of old, handwritten cookbooks. The windows were thickly covered in dust, so only a faint glow from the morning sun would peek past her gossamer curtains. She had three pairs of shoes: one pair for walking, one pair for church, and one pair for inside the house. The fireplace was charred black, and a large pot hung dutifully from a hook above the hearth that smelled of wood and pine. Rows of shelves featured rocks, semi-precious stones, and old photographs from the 1800’s. Although her bed quilt had been threadbare and moth eaten, she kept it made with the tightest tucking I’d ever seen. It was a full-size mattress with two sets of pillows and a very old teddy bear that smelled of sweat and cloves. The home featured three rooms total, and her room was the main living area next to the diminutive kitchen. The other two rooms were filled with old sewing projects and patterns on small tables that resembled TV trays. The smallest room had a twin bed, which I slept in when we came to visit. Though so many figurines dotted the shelves in the little room, there were no cobwebs to speak of. There was a thick layer of powder that lined the windowsills, a mixture of borax and salt. She said the borax was for bugs, but the salt was for evil spirits. The pinnacle of her collections was taxidermized critters that haunted the third bedroom. This room had a full-size mattress where my parents and infant brother would sleep. The piece that always kept my attention was a large black raven that sat above the window, its glassy eyes following every move that I would make. Above each bed hung a dreamcatcher with large brown and white feathers framing a web with tiny black glass beads. The sinew in the center was yellow, and the leather on the frame was a dull brown with fissures forming in its pleats as the wood warped in the lack of climate control. There was exactly one clock in the house; a wind-up alarm clock that she set for five in the morning, so she could brush her long hair before tending her garden just outside the back door. She had a chest of fine combs and brushes that she stored under her bed. I remember her selecting a tortoise shell brush with fine teeth that she used to brush my hair as we sat on her bed, and she told us stories about the mountains in Tennessee. She would braid my hair and hum songs from tunes I never knew but felt in my blood.

Lennox Shuppe is a writer who has been very shy to submit any of their work anywhere. Their hometown is Newport, RI, but thanks to being a Navy brat, they now live in their mom’s home state of Wisconsin, really close to Milwaukee. They are an English Major undergraduate student at UWM on the Creative Writing track. They live with their husband Adrian, and two dogs, Tiki and Drover.