The responsibilities of loving the 'favorite' son.

As I am pouring out the sweet rakia, rakia distilled from walnuts or plums, thicker in substance, than its tequila like counterpart. This liquor has both color and a sickly sweetness, not a quick, burning fire, and I am told that the 'ladies' prefer this rakia, and as I am also a 'lady', this is the bottle I am handed to make the rounds. Therefore, I have no immediate escape route when the flock of crows surround and clasp parts of my flesh in their claw like hands. They are a swarm of black, covered heads, and hand knitted layers. Baba, Grandmother, Strega-nola, witch...they blur in my vision like birds moving too quickly to identify individually. They chatter in tandem, they do not speak the same mother-tongue, if speaking in their first language, I could note the differences between Serbia, Croatian, Macedonian, but the broken English has the same cadence one and all. Each with the same 'tsk, tsk, tongue clucking for dramatic pause-"Good girl, such a good girl", "You miss your mama? You miss Mara?" "Yes?" "Mara in heaven" "Ahhhhhh tsk, tsk, poor, poor, mama, mama crying..." "You know- yes you know, mama crying for you, no babies!" "Marry favorite, but no babies, Zoky favorite!" "You not want Mara unhappy." "You have baby." "You good girl, you have baby." Now!" I stop myself from pointing out that the favorite is overseas working, and I haven't seen the favorite in almost three months. Perhaps the miracle of birth does not bother with such trivialities.
Amidst the non-stop onslaught of my character, I am more concerned with the cloying scent of peppers and dollar-store perfume that permeates the cluster of women, and I fear for permanent damage to my skin. "Is this how they work their magic, is this how they become my future, my transition from lady to crone?" I try to imagine them as individuals, as young women brave enough or desperate enough to travel to a different hemisphere. Surely they did not wear all black then? But I have seen photos, I know that the assortment of hand-knitted vests were always a staple of at least Mara's wardrobe. They ask about my jewelry, the small gold earrings, worn because I knew they were expected, gold is sold by the weight in Prilip the nearest city to the small village where Mara was born. Indeed the earrings were a gift from her, and although I warrant gold chains and watches as well, I do not rate the saints or dead Jesus icons that gleam among each neck. Only a week long, an Orthodox wedding would have solved that aspect of my foreignness. On this day, the sixth week of Mara's death, I can't imagine the wedding rituals being any less exhausting than the current death ritual, for all its proposed happiness. I do suppose the crows would have reminded me of galahs or honey eaters, nothing as garish as a rosella, those colors are not part of the once Yugoslav pallet. I have time to drink down a couple of shots myself, and really this is the most reflection I've had to myself, as they require no answer. I try to focus on one face, free of make-up, with all the intricacies of age. I suppose if I had been one generation closer, I might have had the Italian equivalent of these women in my life. But although I am minus-Fifty, my own mother is only seventeen years my elder, and the brief contact I had with the women of my childhood were all young, feminist, free from consumerist values and all for the individual. These women care greatly for their traditions no matter how skewed by distance and time, they cling to the show of the better life they made by crossing those oceans. They hold to their roles of Mother, worrier, cook, and drinker of 'only' the sweet rakia.