Plump Glass Birds

Creative Non-Fiction by Amanda Bramley

My nostalgia and yours will never be parallel, never the same, perpetually different. Perhaps once in a while, they may converge, intersect. Maybe at an antique store in the middle of nowhere on any day in March. 

Next door, “Misfits for Jesus” waits, an open mouth. We tell our nine-year-old son that we may drop him off there, and he slaps his thigh like an old man. The family laughs. Continuously. There’s a flash point. 

Inside is the carcass of a skating rink. We enter the ribcage: neon carpeting with glowing wheels and pink zig zags, the snack counter still visible, its spine. I point to the center arena, try to explain to my son, and for a blink, it almost seems as if he considers the weight of a simple moment. He holds my hand, as we are about to embark on a musical routine, the ghosts of movements past: tabernacle slide, grapevine, and dip, but then he shifts, slips out of my grip, and lands in a Gainsborough chair. 

We buy a vintage McCormick-Deering cream separator, one-hundred pounds. It takes all three of us, firmly rooted in the concrete, to lift it into the trunk, spider-webs and all, pulling, recurrently, like a breaker. 

On the way home, we drive along the south of the interstate. A country road and the signs of urban development, of movement, we travel between. Train tracks stretch, sprawl outside my passenger window. I watch the passing cross beams, the lightning arrestors, the crossarms, the transformers, the surges, the electrical volts. Repeatedly. The insulators: like plump glass birds, they perch on wooden crosses, breaking barriers between conversations, preventing electrical signals from reaching the ground. 

I watch them, tons of them. They remain as we perpetuate. A fog memory– of a turquoise Hemingray dielectric, brooding on Gram’s desk, a fledgling over horizontal lines. I can recall asking what it was. Someone, a voice from above, told me it was part of a telephone poll– and how ferociously, I did not believe. 

Purple glass insulators are rare. 

Multiple skirts
Slotted head 
Hobnail-patterned based 

I’ve never climbed a telephone pole to string wire. 
But we will all remember
differently.

Amanda Bramley

Amanda Bramley earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University.  She has been previously published in Natural Bridge, The Lindenwood Review, BlazeVox, Waccamaw, and THAT Literary Review and has other publications forthcoming. For twenty-two years, she has been teaching high school English just outside of Saint Louis, Missouri where she lives with her husband, her exuberant son, and her three shedding dogs. Her students know her as “the crazy pug lady.”