Wordless Wednesday

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Motto

It seems hurricanes have had a tremendous impact on me that I do not knowingly carry with me from earlier life. I have distinct memories of hurricanes from my younger days, but in the past few (which have seemed like weeks, by the way) one thought keeps coming to me: ' but that was when my father was in charge.' My father was pretty fearless about most things and a few shingles off the roof or the necessity for gutter repair didn't exactly faze him. He had an extreme respect for trees and I do not think it ever occurred to him that they might betray him and fall on his house. Even if one did, I think he would just think of it as trees doing what trees do and excitedly get involved with repairing the result. The aftermath of a hurricane would find him climbing said trees far too high into their branches to trim damaged limbs. In my third summer from college, on one such ascent, my father fell 75+ feet out of a tree in our backyard. He broke his back, punctured his lung and spent a great deal of time in recovery. Actually, I do not think he ever really recovered because I never saw him scamper up a tree again, and I think he would have! The same tree that he fell from in the summer of 1983, which I now am guessing occurred after a hurricane or at least a tropical storm, suffered great damage from the hurricane this week. In fact, my husband spent all day yesterday cutting a huge limb from it (1/4 of the tree's volume) that thankfully fell in the middle of our backyard and not on anyone or anything.

Said tree was always referred to as my brother's. Two huge trees grew in our yard and towered over everything in the neighborhood as far as the eye could see in those days. They grew side by side, 'though a necessary distance apart, and since there were two trees and two of us, we took individual possession of them. Mine was taller and leaner and had many more branches that formed natural chairs as well as more that provided places to swing from. His was thicker, squatter, and, at least by my standards, was not as much fun. In later years, his tree was one post of a run for our dog and nowadays it is one post of my clothesline.

How that limb snapped on Sunday night without waking any of us up, I will never know. I regret now that I didn't take a photo, but my husband gave me no indication that he would so quickly begin to transform it into logs. I remember saying to a friend on Monday morning "It will take MANY men to pull it out of there." That is a sentence which reveals my ignorance. Of course, that is not what you do with a fallen tree--- or even part of one. What do I know? Only vague memories of climbing them obsessively to sit in and dream in or to hurl my body from through the air towards ground after swinging enough times to gain the proper momentum. Maybe I stopped thinking much about those activities when I walked nonchalantly towards the back screened door while drying dishes that summer day in 1983 to see my father lying on the ground beneath my brother's tree. At first I thought he was napping or stretching out his back... but that slow progression of thought and reaction that happens with every tragedy began a second or two later and I remember slowly looking up and up in a straight line from where he lay up and up the tree noting broken branch upon broken branch. Slowly the words formed in my mind , silent and deafening at the same time "HE FELL."

When I went out, I did not take certain knowledge that he was hurt with me. This was my father after all! Closer, I practically whispered "Dad?" because I wasn't sure if he was asleep. He replied. "Yeah...." "You fell from up there???" "Yeah. Do me a favor and get me a cigarette... (pause) Where's your mother?" My mother was asleep, I reported as I dutifully handed him his cigarette and a matchbook, but it was then that I realized he had begun to emerge from shock and only after a protracted conversation in which I had to gain PERMISSION to call an ambulance did I do so. That was a LONG conversation and my powers of persuasion with such a man were rather limited. It was the increasing pain, the shaking that was becoming more violent and his difficulty breathing that made him finally give in to the idea at just about the same moment I was willing to be defiant.

So... apparently wild weather and I have a long history I have been ignoring. I was thinking only of last year's run in with a wave that pulled me into the ocean.... but there are other hurricane memories I had not been considering. AND knowledge that trees can be dangerous that I had buried deep as well. AND as much as my face is sometimes a map of his, and as much as our senses of humor were remarkably similar, in hurricane response, I am not necessarily my father's daughter. I will not be climbing any trees with a hand saw in tow. I will be calling a 'tree guy' to examine the viability of most of the trees that I have kept company with for my nearly five decades. And anything questionable is coming down purposefully. This isn't what my father would do, I know. Next to all I know about my father and trees and his love of extreme weather I am holding what I think he would want for me. Namely, less anxiety. Against that, too, I am holding that motto above: Dance, Sing, Laugh... LIVE.

~

For entries related to LAST YEAR's close encounter with a hurricane, follow links below:

http://wingedmigration-cmc.blogspot.com/2010/09/i-miss-my-father.html

http://wingedmigration-cmc.blogspot.com/2010/09/well-my-father-would-be-smirking.html

http://wingedmigration-cmc.blogspot.com/2010/09/around-2-pm-yesterday-i-stopped.html

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Hurricane Relief

My beloved home was in a mandatory evacuation zone. I was terribly afraid I would lose it because it is very near the coast directly in the path of Irene. I was able to get there today.

It has been beaten, but is not broken. And I am so very grateful.

So...what is sunnier than a sunflower?

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And on another note entirely:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21033

Close Encounter of the Moth Kind

...as always, click on photos for a larger view...click twice for even larger view....

Gift from my husband...

( ... by the way, the gift was the wing! )

The Goldfish Pond

The Goldfish Pond

by Craig Powell

When you gaze in as a child you wait for the fish -
the rocky ooze and then a glitter of bronze
or tangerine. A few moments only. Every one
has its own darkness to swim to. As though
you were staring into the heart of the earth.

Now like a child you sleep facing your wife
more restful knowing you could open your eyes and watch her.
In the morning you can tell her the dream you had.
You were four years old gazing in a goldfish pond,
glimmer after glimmer, one depth and then another.

...from his chapbook titled Poems For a Marriage, 2008.

And if your eyes are really open while you are walking...

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Rain, Rain, and More Rain

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In my hands/ In the garden ....

I had just dropped the boy off at his friend's house. I saw what looked to be a child's rocking chair on the side of the road awaiting the refuse truck. Closer inspection yielded a tale of particular misfortune: one curved arm missing, caned seat hopelessly caved in. Still, it had been loved. Traces of various coats of paint and craftsmanship told the tale of a long life. I turned it over and fit it into the car where a passenger's legs might have been. The only passenger, 'tho, was a firefly who had nothing better to do since it was morning. I brought it home after removing a spider's egg sac. I made my husband roll his eyes until I clarified that it was for the garden. I cut out the cane seat and toyed with framing part of the pattern for indoors because it was pretty remarkable up close. I have limited wall space, so eventually that idea was vetoed. I went looking for pink geraniums and a pot that would sink into, but be supported by, the chair seat's frame (the size of which proved to be a challenge since this turned out not to be a child's rocker at all). By the way, a few days later I saw its twin on an episode of Little House on the Prairie (I am NOT kidding)! I asked my father-in-law how to protect it from the elements and now it lives in a bed of violets making me smile repeatedly. The firefly was either very attached to the chair or became attached to me. He stayed on until way passed dark, and there I was driving that night laughing and laughing each time he lit up the interior of my car! When I got a hold of myself, we had a very serious conversation about where he really ought to be in life by now, and with some coaxing he went to assume his relegated post in some one's yard to the delight of many, I am sure.

Proof Positive

Its been a hard few days. I normally don't fancy myself being a woman who functions in denial, but the Chris' birthday has brought it all quite UP, and I am not sleeping much. Just a few minutes ago I thought I would look into some electronically archived letters, and then soon after head for bed.

And I found proof. Proof that I had told him about the place he made for us when I first went to visit him a hundred years ago. In a letter dated 10/8/02, I wrote:

"I want you to know, Chris. I want it to be you getting off that bus, you walking into YOUR embrace, you sitting in - bathed in - the warmth of your space, the space I know you created for us, you walking into that embrace again this summer. "

Later, same letter:

"I want to claim you back from it all, every harm, every hurt , every pain, every dark corner. If only I could. I cannot. My only option? Be here for you and with you or walk out of the miracle of this love I have had with you and known from you practically since I can remember feeling alive at all. So I am right here, Chris. Two hands. Two ears. Huge heart. And I will walk with you anywhere."

So I can go to sleep, then? [Yes.] He knew. I told him. How grateful I was (it is there in the first quoted bit). And how much I loved him (there in the second bit).

In praise of hydrangeas....

It was my friend's birthday. It was the anniversary of our reunion, as I have come to say 'after long silence.' It was also the day (last year) that I marked by writing and then leaving a letter for him near the river he loved so much. The route to the river includes hydrangeas, and he loved them, too.

I did not go to the river. I am still unsure that I will ever make my way there again. I haven't yet held the portion of his ashes that are entrusted to me (at least not to acknowledge this particular occasion). I wouldn't even get very close to where he is interred. But I went there... to the chapel... with his sister.

I watched the evidence of her grief, and knew again what was already certain; that her's is most like mine. But after sharing tables, tears, meals and secrets, I landed on the thought that being with her was probably more of a comfort to me than to her. They look so much alike, after all.
He's there in the way she throws her head back when she laughs. In her height. In the hue of her skin. In her eyes. In her hands ---except that her's are so tiny.

Oh, I am hoping he saw us! I am hoping he was the invisible guest, silent partner and third wheel... because he would have loved that we were together.

I am tired. School has been out for a solid month, and still I don't find time to write here or to write the letters I have promised here and there. And the sorrow is still exhausting. I still don't know what to do with it. I have fine moments, but, in general, things have a flatness. Maybe I have said that before? I found it hard to string thoughts together this weekend. I remember, by feel, the way I described the sensation of loss : shot at close range by a musket. This weekend I used "blown apart." Can it be that I was better at all of it--- articulation included --- a year ago???

How do I take him with me and [ still ] go on? I realize, actually, that I am beginning to forget things, or confuse them, when artifacts like letters set me straight. People talk about his laughter and I am not really sure that I can still hear it. Have I fleshed out the edges and filled in the gaps with what I think belongs there?

Fear. It was Sunday's sermon, and, obviously, it stays with me when moments or memory flee. In C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed he starts off with fear as well. I hear my friend's query as I type this, words running together, "Whatsamatter, darlin?" It's all the matter... It's that he mattered. It's that he was matter. It's that I mattered, too.

Have I said before that our knowledge of each other began with a letter? I know I haven't said that I made a trip to see him sight unseen in one of my lifetime's few acts of pure bravery. I haven't said--- at least not here--- that the place he prepared for us was probably the most comfortable place I had ever been up to that time in my life. That would please him so to know... and I can't remember if I ever told him ....

Fear. Fear of what I left unsaid ( although it is minor and I am capable of shaking it off ). Fear that there is so little I know. Except for this: what I brought him--- what I brought to him --- may already be the most important thing my life will have accomplished. He was extraordinary; in the long catalog of things that made him so, there is that he made sure I knew exactly what our currency had been. Thank God he did. I'd be adrift, I swear, without his deliberate precision in articulating value and affection. Many who knew him would be suffering so much more without that loving habit of his.

SO here I am. A year later. Still feeling the musket blow. A year of deliberate resistance from the gravitational pull of grief. Still trying to remain upright and grappling for relief. Talking to him in the dark, seeing him in my mind's eye.... Meaning was wrought into so many moments, clarity and comfort are found in many of them....And in reaching for his sister's hand in a makeshift chapel or across a table.


somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

by e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully , suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

before the storm...