Casa Azul

Perhaps God looks like Frida Kahlo or, perhaps God is Frida Kahlo who has knit her eyebrows against us in disapproval, holding her parrots in her lap, on her shoulders.

It's raining today and all sorts of things are going through my head. I had so wanted to walk this morning but I am not going out in that. No way. I took the garbage to the garbage place and ran into the post office but besides that, no. I haven't even taken the grapes to the chickens yet. And the dogs, of course, are stealthily peeing and pooping in the house because they don't want to go out either.
But it's good for the garden, perfect timing in fact. Did you know that here in North Florida Valentine's Day is the day your peas and potatoes should be in the ground?
Well. Now you know.

It's hard to feel anything but God's disapproval on a day like today. If I believed in God. Or a god who cared one damn shit about what I or you do or even Sara Palin. I can barely stand to listen to the news. Even on my beloved NPR they are discussing the Tea Party endlessly. Fuck the Tea Party. I doubt seriously that Frida would give them more than one whisp of a passing thought, except to remember to have tea ready for Trotsky and his wife, and then perhaps to rethink the menu to tequila, the better potion to seduce the old man with.

While all the other painters were painting the huge murals depicting the struggle of the native people against the Capitalists, Frida painted herself. Over and over again. She painted her love and her fear and her hate and her miscarriages and her injuries and her eyebrows, knit with worry and scoffing at the world and its pain and its falseness and unfaithfulness. She painted her eyes, gleaming out from under those brows and she painted flowers in her hands with thorns that made her bleed and parrots who perched cruelly on her shoulders, monkeys who entangled her in their loco-long arms.

I am thinking of Frida today and am seeing her, rising painfully from her bed and going to the kitchen to brew dark coffee and I wonder if she sweetened it with brown, course sugar and thick-creamed milk. I am wondering. I think she would have looked out at the rain and sighed, having known from the dreams she'd had the night before where her bones ached to distraction that the rain was coming. I wonder if she watched it fall on her red geraniums, her hibiscus, her great beds of cactus and run down the walls of her blue, blue house.

Casa Azul, Casa Azul, the rain whispers.

Would she take up her paintbrush or would she, in her white petticoat with her hair streaming down her back return to her bed and lie down on her back and stare up at the ceiling and listen to the rain? And would tears slip down the sides of her face because some days the eyes must wash themselves as does the sky wash itself?

Would she hear roosters crowing in the rain? Would she think of the hens as they huddled against it? Would she mentally count the eggs in her kitchen, even as she silently wept, wondering if there were enough for an omelet because surely, Diego would want his breakfast. A fat man needs his breakfast, even an unfaithful fat husband needs his breakfast.

I don't know. I only know it is raining and I hear roosters crowing and Frida died in Mexico City thirteen days before I was born in El Paso, Texas and sometimes I think of her, those knit brows, those broken limbs, that tortured heart, painted open for us to see into every chamber, every beating, bloody part.

I would rather think of that then the Tea Party, so vapid and silly. I would rather think of peas and potatoes to be put in the ground and wet hens and I would rather think of soup. I would rather think of Frida's eyebrows than of Sara Palin's bangs. I would rather think of hell than those bangs and I beg Frida's forgiveness for even putting those bangs and her eyebrows in the same sentence and it is still raining.