The Importance of Friendship Bracelets and Cane Fields

[sugar pinch]

First of all, I’m not afraid to die.

Every morning I pour brown sugar
into an empty mug
and my daughter steals a pinch.

On tiptoes, she pretends to be sneaky.
With knowing eyes, I pretend to be mad.
Our game ends with crunches of crystals between her teeth and my favorite little laugh.

And I’m terrified,
that somewhere beyond life
when I’m bones in a grave
It’s the little things - the sugar pinches
that the ghost of me will crave.

I am afraid.

The Importance of Friendship Bracelets and Cane Fields

I’ve spent my last few evenings teaching my daughter how to tie knots in a pattern that some would call a “friendship bracelet”. At her request, we sit together and repeat the directions I’ve taught her, like a mantra.

I show her how to hold her strings tight in little lines. I show her how to make her loops tight and small. And I tell her of the times when I was her age, making friendship bracelets at elementary school with my friends - just like this - sitting criss cross applesauce, side by side.

Showing someone how to do something
can feel ritualistic in a way.

She’s only six years old, so some knots are more knotty than knotted. Her hands are small, but they’re doing their best. Sure, they lose track of the lines she’s crossed over. And the loops are way too big. But she listens and she talks. And we sit side by side, just the same.

She’s even started to bring string to school, showing her friends how to tie knotty knots of their own.

Showing someone how to do something
feels ritualistic in a way.

/

When I was eight or nine, my dad took my sister and I out into the cane fields where he worked on tractors before the sun came up. He wasn’t a farmer, but the farmers would call him out. The cane fields were his office and he knew them well.

Now, you’d think anyone from Louisiana knows a Sugar Cane field like the back of their hand. But you only see them from highways or acres away across pastures. Cane fields are mostly background noise - a landscape. Most people from here have never touched raw sugar with their fingertips or tasted its juice grown straight from the dirt.

But my dad lived amongst the stalks. So one morning, when we had to join him on one of these early morning calls, my dad walked us through the fields.

Approaching the rows, I remember how carefully he took a knife from its sheath. In one swing, he chopped the cane straight through at the base.

His boots were stained with mud from some previous days’ work. I tried to step in his footprints as I followed all the way back to his truck. As we walked, the long, green leaves towered over his head, almost tickling his hat. I never would’ve guessed sugar cane was that big from the passenger seat of a car. But standing beside it, I now understood how those big machines could break so easily at the hands of a plant.

Once we finally got back to his Ford, he opened the red tailgate and we climbed on in. He showed us how to snap the stalk in half at the knots, and how to peel the outsides free, exposing the flesh. Though, it wasn’t easily separated. It was more of a ripping than a peeling.

Dad showed us that first, you chew. Really chew. As soon as the taste faded, that’s when you’d spit the used fibers out. We loved that part; spitting bone-dry, mangled sugarcane bites into the muddy ruts next to his tires.

I never told him that all that work was never really worth the few seconds of the reward. But I’m glad he showed us, just the same.

Being shown how to do something feels almost ritualistic in a way.

Show somebody how to do something.
-until next time. cd