A few weeks ago D and I were still blissed out after coming back from the dreamiest stay with my aunties (Aunties, I still owe you a thank you card!!). In my wonderful aunties’ Sonoma County oasis we got to visit chickens and pluck freshly laid eggs out of their beds, pick borage and nasturtium flowers for our dinner salads, sit around blind taste-testing wines (main takeaway: my palette is awful) and talk about our experiences of queerness across the generations. There were blackberries picked off the vine, there was barefoot star-gazing, there was showering outside in the morning shade with the scent of plums underfoot. When I say dreamy, I mean dreamy.
At their table, D and I, the youngsters of the weekend, threw around the label “queer” casually. It’s an easy term for us to use, reclaimed as it’s been by our generation of activists and public figures. But, D and I noticed later, that my aunties refrained from using the word. “Queer,” D and I understood, is not the same word to all people in the LGBT universe. My aunties told us stories of living through the Briggs Amendment era–of colleagues walking in their local pride march but with paper bags over their heads, a mind-reeling image to me. And we also got to laugh about our species’ enduring love of lesbian typology.
There’s so much we owe our elders, so much that they lived through that I can barely even fathom, and also, a lot that’s still the same. We may use different labels for our identities, but my aunties generously told us about how they too, even now, continue to grapple with how they understand themselves. Their openness was a real gift.
We left for San Francisco with a care package full of frittata and coffee cake, shiny wisteria seeds that our aunties said burst like rockets out of their pods, yellow plums that dropped down on us while D and I sat in their hot tub. On the drive back to the city and all full up on love I felt a stirring resolve to be good to my community the way my aunties were to me and D.
It’s something I thought about for the rest of the weekend. Somewhere along the way we’d also squeezed in a trip to Berkeley Bowl, and so had plenty of veg and the best of stone fruit season stashed in D’s fridge. I nearly cried tears over the beauty of black velvet apricots. What sexy fruit.
How will I be good to family, community, young people who are coming up now?
Back in the city that Sunday morning D and I woke up a few minutes before the Women’s World Cup final and turned it on from bed. We squinted at it on D’s phone, not bothering to move to a larger screen. I, having just come upon my new favorite hobby, gushed about Megan Rapinoe, while D got up to fix some coffee, and a while later we finally sat down to breakfast. We watched the last of the game with the frittata from my aunties on the table in front of us, and I couldn’t help smiling at the scene: two queer people making out over leftovers from our lesbian aunties with the Women’s World Cup on in the background.