Aunt Jemima

During my leisurely (20 minute) shower this morning (one of my few[er] and far[ther] in between personal indulgences I afford myself, because, well ya know, I like to smell nice and bathing is considerably less trouble than scraping away weeks worth of funk layers at a time), a random memory emerged from my dusfunctional childhood database: making an Aunt Jemima door stop in Vacation Bible School.

I'm still not sure why I thought of that... it really wasn't very significant at the time.

It was a wooden cut out, painted up with our own personal touches -- mine had a kerchief atop her happy chocolate face, her hands folded across an apron around her plump mid-section.

I never thought much about the racial cliché at the time; I was young and all I knew was all I knew. The adults in my life then were hardly any more the avant garde literati than I.

She held my parent's front door open for years. I'm sure she's still around there somewhere (they never throw anything away), but I wouldn't know... They say, "you can never go home again"... and well, I haven't.

But I kinda miss Aunt Jemima.

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"There's no place like home... there's no place like home..."
--Dorthy Gale, The Wizard of Oz