I'm sitting in a little cafe, the kind old people eat at. The waitress has given me a menu and she has returned to get my order, but I'm still reading it.

"Are you ready? Or are you still making up your mind?"

"Oh, Ummm, I think I want a roast beef sandwich and some soup. What is the soup of the day?" I say.

"Split pea. Do you want a cup or a bowl?"

"A bowl." I say with a smile. Memories are flooding back to me at the mention of split pea soup.

**** My mom had left my dad fairly recently, and was working at a dairy as a milker. We lived in the farmhouse near the dairy barn. It was an stately old white house that had belonged to the Governor of Montana fifty years ago, but was now something less.

The dairy farmer she worked for wasn't conscientious about caring for his animals. He should have used a tractor to scrape the thick green manure out of the walkways, but he didn't. Some of his young cows had actually drowned in the chest deep slurry. His cows found it hard to rest in the mess.

Mom was milking, and I woke up without her in the house. I wasn't four years old yet. In that stage of life everything is imitated. I saw Lawrence of Arabia commercials, and copied them by putting a dishtowel on my head and running around on my stick pony wielding a yardstick. When my mom came in from work, I was in the bathroom playing an huge game of checkers on the black and white tiles on the bathroom floor with aspirin from the medicine cabinet. I still had my "turban" on.

I was standing on a 2x4 wall that separated the stall my mom was cleaning, and the green sloppy manure. Mom had brought me out with her into the place where the cows slept. She was trying to make things better for them by cleaning their beds. Sometimes there is only so much you can do without the support of the people in charge.

BLOOP

I fell in. Mom pulled me out and carried me over to a watering tank. She used my turban to wipe the thick pea-green goop off me, then dipped it back in the tank to clean me off. She took me home and got me all cleaned up.

We were sitting at the table. She set a bowl of split pea soup down in front of me. My eyes got wide. I disappeared upstairs and hid.

My mom still dreams at night of drowning in split pea soup.