Salt of the Earth

TOMASELLI AWARD, Winner

NONFICTION

by Summer Mohrmann

My hands crack in the winter. Thin tissue paper with purple creases. Tear it and red gel oozes forth. They don’t bleed like regular cuts, they ooze. I wrap them in band-aids or tape paper towels around my fingers. Mostly I ignore it.

When I was little, my mom cooked us dinner every night. A meat, a starch, a vegetable— my mom cooked us dinner every night and, although I was a somewhat picky eater (a sin I’ve since outgrown), I would pick the food apart with a particular trepidation about getting food or grease on my hands. I was (and still am) always a bit of a freak about certain sensory experiences— although, working as a line cook for over half a decade served well to desensitize me to greasy, gross, wet hands. I can butcher a whole chicken in under a minute— divide it into eight parts in a minute flat.

My mother’s hands used to crack and bleed so badly in the winter that she had to buy farm-grade grease to slather on them at night. Sometimes she would soak them and sleep in gloves, only to rinse them the next day and find the old tears and rips all-too-ready to bleed: “todays a new day,” they would say with their oozing smiles etched in olive flesh, “how can you be sure you’re alive if you aren’t bleeding?”

My mom cooked us dinner every night, and she always had a wound she was nonchalantly nursing: burns from the oven, chunks missing from tips of fingers (wrapped haphazardly in a blood-soaked paper towel held in place with pointer and thumb). Like Kronos eating his cosmic brood, my mother fed us bits and pieces of herself willingly— marinated cutting boards in her blood and flavoring roast pans with charred flesh— I sometimes wonder how much of her we ate over the years.

There were foods only my jiddo made, and my mom and I had to learn how to do it ourselves after he got sick and died. We brined grape leaves in our tears, and flavored rolled up cabbage for malfouf with the salt of our blood (the sauce is conveniently already a deep red).

You see, we had both learned to leak from the cracks in our hands by then.

What, do you think, was the name of Jephthah’s daughter? What was the name of Lot’s wife? What were the names of the people she left behind when they fled the burning city? If she had been my mother, I would have broken off her hand and taken it with me.

my mother, I would have broken off her hand and taken it with me.

On the banks of the Dead Sea, there are salt deposits thinner than paper that sparkle and crack in the sun. They bake onto the rocks until everything turns white, like fresh snowfall in the desert. The second to last time I was home— the last time I was truly home, the last time my jiddo was alive there to meet me— I smuggled back a bottle of water from the river Jordan (truncated and controlled by the occupational forces living on the other side— you should see the wealth disparity between the occupied and indigenous banks. So much money they don’t even need the water. It’s just a tourist trap.) and a bottle of water from the Dead Sea. The water from Christ's baptismal site has long since turned purple and green from the slime of life it holds within the womb of the little mason jar. The jar of Dead Sea water is still perfectly clear, sterile, with little crystals of salt nestled on the bottom. Shake it and they jingle, glimmer in the sunshine like a snow-globe.

If Lot's wife had been my mother, I would have taken her hand and sprinkled it onto all the food I ate for the rest of my life. It has always been my mother’s salt that cured my ails, not the tainted didacticisms of my father.

I suppose in the process of turning to face my mother one last time, to look into my mother’s face and hold her hand one last time, I would have been made salt too.

Now we cook our meals together, cracked hands bleeding and flavoring the meat, dripping eyes salting our wounds.

 The real lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah is that anyone who lives long enough turns to salt– that’s the lesson ignored.

Love— with tears and blood— will always salt the earth.