Sometimes our stories are harder, then others. Some stories carry greater textures. Some are encased with freedom like tiny homes worth putting in the plumbing and laying down the pipe. Some are steady -rising and falling.

Some are of “deep pits yelling for help.” As the elder-mothers ‘ back home in Texas would put it. “Some through the water, some through great-trials, some through the flood,”

but all the stories I know seep out through the blood.

As a child, I remember gospel music constantly playing in my house. I believe my mother played the gospel music to deliberately drown out the sorrows of poverty, segregation, and the sheer weight what it meant to live through all of it.  Be alive to see it.

In the words of the late-great Mahalia Jackson: “It would be always Howdy -Howdy and never goodbye”- “I’ll be watching somewhere around the altar” -“drink that old healing water” and live on forever” “My soul looks back and wonder, how I made it over”

and only now can I appreciate- The Hammond B organ, all the sermonic selections – I’d slept through. And though most of those I knew back home in Texas are now gone. Their sound still keeps me up at night. Just knowing – the elder mothers’ are somewhere around the altar praying and watching.

kindness sis. Krissy  ✨😊