Pink Tulle

I will dance around you with pointed toes. I will hesitantly observe and outline the shape of what you could be, what I have dreamt you would be since my youth. My heart will plead to step closer. My intellect will impede my feet. You are a ballerina that embodies my own spirit; that flickering wick that casts shadows multitudes times its own size. You are beautiful and in my own most intimate moments I cannot stop staring at you.

You are my dream, the bounty that can be my life here on this earth. You are the ultimate capture of who I was created to be and what I was intended to do. I can feel your pulse in rhythm with mine sometimes and in those minutes I am well. At those times I am more than well, for I am abundant.

Please, do not stop calling to me. Stay lit and alive, my spirit. Fan yourself again the dark walls and light the faces of those who see who you truly are. Shine modestly and confidently.

And self - earthly, malnourished, and improper self - do not stay long away. Forgive your misgivings and step closer. Do not be afraid of the dancer whose feet are your own. Because that beauty you admire is within reach. That rich and satisfying depth is attainable.

Achieve it.

Our pace took sudden awe.

When we came to visit last night you gave us your bed to sleep in because it is the firmest mattress in the house. I did not want to take it but you insisted, so eventually we conceded.

As I prepared for sleep I couldn't help but notice that Dad still uses the Avon brush you bought for us decades ago. It sits on the vanity counter. I cannot remember how long ago I threw mine away. It must have been right after we moved from the Dakotas. Yet there his stills lies, a small reminder of the night you came home and surprised us with those hard-bristled brushes. It immediately transports me to the green downstairs bathroom in our old house, where your three children gathered together each evening to brush our hair, clean our teeth, and prepare for bed.

You still hold many relics that comprise the background of things that were my childhood: the shallow pink glass dish with fish feet and a shell lid, the large ceramic bunny whose hollow body has always carried Q-Tips, the wicker clothes basket I used in my room.

Last night I was enjoying being reminded of that simpler life. I did not want the moment to end and so I went and stood in your closet long enough to see my poetry you've hung on its walls, the photos of your three children in frames. I noticed the miniature jewelry box atop your dresser and before I could stop myself I opened its small doors. The three wooden drawers are in tact and still house those olive-colored hoops in the first one. I found pins I have not seen in twenty years, ones you adorned on jean jumpers when you taught pre-K in Valley City.

Thank you for keeping the memorabilia, Mom. Perhaps you've known what you were doing all along, but in case you haven't, just know that these small pieces you've held on to are tangible memories that remind me that the past is still within us. That we are not too far gone from those long and happy days.

Marguerite Annie Johnson, or Maya

You wrote a book entitled "Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes". On the cover you smile, wearing a black head scarf as you look at someone in the background or perhaps a memory in the distance.

Why did I think you were a writer-turned-cook-part-time poet? How did I not explore you long before now?

It happens this way often; someone noteworthy passes and the world collects favorite reminders to speak of what you meant to a culture, a people, and as a person. We enunciate your legacy because we know that by speaking it we won't forget too soon. That by saying your words we might be able to carry along your spirit a bit longer and hopefully, always.

But how did I reduce you by not really knowing your story? Because of your death I found a breath of life in your writings and became enamored and humbled and stunned at what you present in them - the little bit I know!

I did not know you had a son by age 16,
became a "shaker dancer in a nightclub to support him",
cooked hamburgers,
was a madam for lesbian hookers,
and unsuccessfully tried prostituting yourself.
(mashable.com)

I did not know that you took that dark time which augmented your life and refused to hide those experiences, that you entitled a work "Come Together in My Name" so that, "[a]ll those grown people, all those adults, all those parents and grandparents and teachers and preachers and rabbis and priests who lie to the children can gather together in my name and I will tell them the truth. Wherever you are, you have got to admit it and set about to make a change. That's why [you] wrote the book. It's the most painful book [you've] ever written" (teentalkingcircles.org).

You invited people to gather under your stories in your name and stare at your life so that we could know a little bit of truth in part of you. So that we could know perfection is not innate, like so many of us are led to believe.

That we can rest and know there is still a time to get up. All is not lost.

You brave woman. You invited your written words against your own reputation to care for those of us who needed to walk alongside someone, someone who knows that life is messy and confusing at times. Who knows that you can stand up and walk away from a thing. You are a person whose words have the power to help lift a soul from soot.

I hope you are dancing.

Roses

Tonight I remember the fake wood on the walls of my childhood bedroom. The off-white wrought iron bed frame stood against them in the corner. Opposite were pink walls brushed with white as though to look like roses.

How do I explain the smell of my room when the windows stayed open all night, without bringing you along to the past?

The air was never sticky or humid and the temperatures dropped low without the sun, even in the summer. Cows parading below the second-story window each morning and I would lay in bed and watch them as I awoke.

The pastures,
The grass, the dirt, and my clean sheets.
The wooden floors of a house built in 1906, stained and varnished over and over again. The grainy feel they had from a lack of sanding.

The lacy bed cover atop my pink blanket on my bed and cool, crisp sheets underneath.

Long hours into the night when I could not sleep; this is when the gold-plated light on my stand would keep me and my books company as we ventured along trails and traveled miles together.

Tonight I am here, writing these words and hoping to travel long miles backwards, to remember a time when sights and smells and touch were all that comprised life. There were no harsh feelings, there were no burdens too heavy, there were only moments to capture and hide away.

To talk about one's thoughts, feelings, or experiences with others

Carve out your story and serve me its lines. Tell me about how your father's grey hair shone in the light those summer nights when he hunched and did dishes at the kitchen sink. Tell me how your mother's hands looked when she held a small needle and sewed patches on your worn jeans,

or how your brother's gums were bright and pink when he lost those teeth.

Tell me how your childhood home smelled, how your spirits rose along with the breeze from the sea through its windows. Or how the linoleum on the bathroom floor cracked and yellowed with the years, how you saw it out of the corner of your eye that year when you turned ten and blew out birthday candles with a group of elementary-school friends.

Tell me. I want to hear. And then listen, because I want to tell.

Synthesis

Hand me that lavender, love. I want to hold its petals and bracts. I want to breathe in its delicious smell from my cupped hand and savor the moment that becomes suspended with its aroma.

Sleep sweetly, sleep soundly. Dream of lemon rinds and cloudless skies.

Do not find complaint, for this life is as the topsoil in a a farmer's hands, rich with decayed organisms and roots and life; his fingerprints become black and stained with velvet dirt that makes up the Earth's chewy crust.  This life is rich. It is messy and dark, it is teaming with rot as it hosts the existence of multitudes.

This life is like the topsoil in a farmers hands, cradled, creviced, and completely dirty.

Rest now. Your lavender grew from this life. Every good thing does.

A yearning, found nearly hopeless but not quite.

The escape is simple: create.

I distinguish myself from the rodents who run amuck in their wire cages by creating. Thoughts, words, ideas, dreams. These fluid graces that permeate the human experience by inviting the mind to escape, or rather, enrich it.

However, it seems that creativity necessitates that thing which our modern lives best thieve from us - our time. My question becomes how does one reconcile these seeming polarities? And that is where I am stuck.

Because I can think for myself as I type and scan, drive and wash and sweep. A lack of daydreaming is not the issue. The issue is that I do not find the time in order to capture these daydreams, nor that to challenge them. They just are. They just exist. So then, to what end? They just...are? I suggest that dreams, thoughts, and ideas are meant to be discussed, encouraged, or provoked. They are meant to be used as fodder for conversations, bricks to lie relationship foundations. Ideas and visions give us something to talk about with one another, whether we agree upon it or not. 

And so a person who does and does without the creating bit, without this showing of one's soul in tangible form, seems to have missed something very important about life at its very core. 

They seemed to have, in fact missed it altogether. That part that makes us distinctly human.

So let's take a secretary (or Administrative Professional, if we like that better) and put her behind a desk for 40 hours a week. Say she's ambitious, she starts a business and does that on top of her full time job. She's married, has a dog, and there are responsibilities to uphold. In order to do all of this she sleep a full eight hours every day. 

Which leaves her an average of 4 hours a day (after accommodating getting ready in morning and cooking dinner at night) with which to create. One can argue driving takes up a quarter of that, which may be fair.

But that still leaves 3, and if cut in half to accommodate errands and the like, 90 minutes. An hour and a half, on average, each day to create. Energy may be lacking but one could argue that the creative process recharges the mind. 

And so. 

A few thoughts on the advantages of an office

Today was an accomplished one. Perhaps it's that type of measure in my mind - whether I feel as though I've "done" something - that I need to stop. But until I can forcibly retract this need to feel productive I will still base the merit of my day upon how much I did.

Once I understood basic loans terms like down payment and PMI, or how significant the "flood zone" was, it doesn't seem that finding a house could be that difficult. But what I have learned is that timing is everything. And so part of my productive day included me driving by the only house in the area we like that is in our price range. Horrified at its obvious lack of curb appeal, I forced myself to drive by it several times. I slowed each time and strained my eyes to see if I was really looking at a half-brick facade behind the car port. Eventually I had to drive away and leave the beast alone because the neighbor was starting to squint her eyes too hard at me. If we're to be neighbors one day, I'd better not appear too eager too soon.

So there was that.

The rest of the day consisted of me smiling and scanning documents at my desk like any good secretary (or is it PC to say Administrative Assistant these days?) would do. The list of tedious projects grew like a plant with just the right amount of sunlight and water until I broke down and went for a walk around the block. I caught my second wind and all was well again as I sat to finish the excel spreadsheet that details contracts signed in appropriate months.

Running my wheels like a small rodent in its cage has become natural to me now. Well, I can't really say natural - perhaps the better word is routine.

And so.

Pleasantly, perfunctory

These calm nights are the ones we look to for reprieve. These calm nights are the ones we hoard in our back pockets and walk around with in the middle of next week's transcript. These calm nights remind our spirits that rest rejuvenates.

That rest rejuvenates,

as we are able to reflect,
re-imagine,
retreat.

It's remembering that I can scoop a part of my spirit and bring it closer to my mind, that these two parts of me are not, in fact, separate. That after all this work, all that time, so many hiccups, that I am still Laura. And given enough times like these to chip away at all of the external debris I've gathered along this route, I am still Laura at the end of this night.

With my husband reading his book over there by the light source. And the dog with his cocked head on my arm. With this patchwork blanket across my lap and its felt side down so that my legs burn with heat, with the silence between us all acting as a basin of peace, with my head against the recliner.

Arise anew

I sit in the final rays of this afternoon's beloved sunlight as Matthew throws the tennis ball and Smokey runs after it. Incredibly nimble and fast, the dog approaches the ball within seconds but he only stops it; he does not yet know to bring it back for fetch.

The pollen is thick on our patio set and everywhere else. Wiping it down does little to cease its spread across our yard or ourselves. And yet here we are, outside in this warm light and the neighborhood alive with birds and dogs and children. We have neighbors across the fence. When Smokey barks at them, someone barks back. An embarassed girl giggles and says, "Mom!"

Tennis balls, sun rays, pollen, the dog.

Refresh, spirit of mine. Allow yourself to heal.

A tutorial.

Muddled.

That is what happens when one tries writing about something of which you are in the midst. The theory is that you are yet so close to the experience that, like an impressionist's painting, all you detect are dabs and dots of colors that make no sense. Months, years, decades later perhaps you will stand back and reflect and try to make sense of the event or its series, if there is even sense to be made about the whole thing. And so after all that time you will have that, at least. Sense.

So then, I have decided to share my method of buttermilk biscuits to avoid rummaging around with words like death and legacy, both of which have monopolized my mind quite enough this week.

Step one: Gather your ingredients. It is simple, really: you need 1/2 cup of unsalted butter, 2 1/4 cups self-rising flour, and 1 1/2 cups of buttermilk.

Step two: Cube the butter. Make sure it is right out of the fridge, as this is an important element to the method.

Step three: Put the self-rising flour in a bowl and the cubed butter in with it. Use your hands to cut the butter into the flour until it looks coarse. Almost like cornmeal, but not as granulated.

Step four: Put butter and flour mixture into the fridge for ten minutes, make sure oven is 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Step five: Take out of fridge. Incorporate buttermilk and flour mix together with a wooden spoon. Only mix until all ingredients are wet.

Step six: Pour lumpy mess onto a well-floured surface. Immediately begin a 3-part envelope fold, alternately horizontal and vertical folds. Do this 6 times at the most. Make a square shape with dough and leave it at around 3/4 of an inch thick.

Step seven: Cut out biscuit shapes with a 2-3 inch diameter and place closely together on a lightly-greased cookie sheet.

Step eight: Put into oven for 14 minutes. Take out, brush with melted butter. Enjoy.

There, you see? Hot topic, cold prose.

For seven minutes I avoid thinking about Jim's death, the notes of affirmation we found in his stack of stuff, Erickson's developmental stages, and the dull sadness that seeps into a life without active creativity.

The biscuits are really very good.

On discarded articles, abandoned unceremoniously.

Today we put the remaining miscellaneous of your deceased grandparents' things in a dumpster with a capacity of four tons. 

I don't know how you felt because we worked hard at it for 90 minutes and then went back inside to shower and eat without talking about it. But I saw you kept the wooden sign with her initials.

At first I could tell it was junk we were moving. There was a pile high with inflatable inner tubes and rags, half-full cans full of paint, and the like. It wasn't until after all of that when we got to your grandfather's work benches and your grandmother's books that I was struck by the task at hand. The partial cans of motor oil and the old Maxwell coffee containers labeled nuts, bolts, and nails, the pegboard intended for use later on, and the old work shirt I found strewn in the corner - they all told me a story. The pieces of his life in this barn told me how much time he spent out there tinkering, thinking. I stood and held a pile for the dumpster and looked around. I imagined this man I never met, toying with odds and ends and electronics. I wondered at his thoughts in those hours of solitary time. 

And there were your grandmother's books. Surely, these were once kept carefully in the house, safe from the weather and musk and rodents. But someone could not bear to throw them out and they were brought in here for safekeeping as they worked the courage to rid her things. The books; many titles of nonfiction and National Geographic. There were children's books, which I imagine she might have read to you. There were so many Reader's Digest compilations. And I saw a glimpse into the interests of a women I have only heard about. I wondered if she read all of the titles. I did not recognize them.

Like clockwork, you and I trucked back and forth from garage to dumpster with our arms full of others' lives. We passed one another midway and might have glanced or not. The barn slowly began to look empty, to show its walls and floor, and stairs to the second floor. 

We reached the maximum level on the dumpster. "Small and heavy things," you told me. "Small and heavy things." And we found more oil cans. We found old batteries. We took a house fan from the 1950s and tossed it over the edge. 

"Small and heavy things," you said.

In the end it was the books. I hate to say that, it hurts to admit it. But in the end we took the books, too. 

Ranunculus

I feel an affinity toward you, Emily. The Myth, the Lady in White, the poet.

Some necessary research on your basic history led me to a site that claimed to hold your biography and I found myself enthralled by you. It is foremost the fact that you were content not to be published or seek to be widely read during your lifetime, that you wrote because it brought you joy. Secondly that you were often baking, and excelled at it. Thirdly that you tended to a garden that became greatly admired in Amherst. Well done, Emily.

Those reasons, and more: because you bravely wrote directly to a contributor of the Atlantic Monthly to inquire his opinion of your talents, and because of, later, the way you described yourself in a letter to Mr. Higginson. Because you were close with your family, that you became reclusive but not bitter, ill but not forlorn, not always. You are both morbid and dainty in your writing, capturing at once the marriage of a finite sense of life and a peculiar, eternal longevity, too. What I read from others and what I read from you seem to tell a story of a woman taunted by the deaths of those she loved, one whose reclusive nature did not yield anger but rather introspection and a curious sense of humor.

I admire that you do not hold true to a form in your style, that it is rumored you did strange things (like speak to people through doorways instead of face to face), that you requested your coffin be carried, not driven, through the buttercups to your gravesite. The very request embodies you; poetic, serene, and macabre.

To act other than what is normal in the pursuit

It's that glee which suddenly and irrelevantly escapes one's mouth, in the form of a toothy grin and sparkling eyes, upon realizing people will come to this thing you have built. I must now learn to trust myself, or try to, for I am still unsettled by the sheer imagination this project possesses. And yet, I reach out and touch it and I know it is real.

Because I am living proof that a wild-caught hare of a dream can really, actually become true, so now you must believe in yours. And so, I carry on with this.

And so.

You and I, Dad.

Together we built that napkin holder for Mom. I drew penciled hearts along the side of it and you smiled and drank coffee from your travel mug. Is that the memory I want to remember?

When did I think your accident would be easy? I supposed that you would physically return home and your brain was elastic enough to bounce back to its former being because you are my dad and you can do anything. You could do anything.

You could do anything. 

And now, I realize that you were broken on June 6, 2002. All those years ago, your brain was injured and a big part of it was taken away and you are different. I thought that essay I penned in college fixed it, Dad. I thought when I put those words on a piece of paper and it was published in a magazine, that I could put it on a shelf and store it away and allow your brain injury to become a dusty memory we  could all ignore. 

I thought I'd dealt with this and that I knew what to expect. But the partial death of the fatherly figure I knew is something I am only just learning how to cope with. Because now Mom is aging and you do not have the skills to care for her. 

Because now you are doing illogical things that makes us all wonder where you went. You bring home ammunition and tell us to prepare for an apocalypse and to buy seeds; many, many seeds. 

Mom has told me that she will need you to sign the house over to her name because of the likelihood of Alzheimer's in the near future. 

And all I can think about is that damn napkin holder. You were my hero, Dad. And you are here, you are still here but I've lost the father of my childhood, of my best memories. 

And I never mourned him. And tonight I cry desperately, trying to grasp something that no longer exists in this life. I am trying to cup air in my hands. Even my deep breaths cannot satiate the desperation for oxygen, because there is not enough in this entire house to calm a broken heart. 

You did not teach me, Dad, how to be okay right now. I am going into a cold and silent adventure, blindly with our family as we try to help you understand what we cannot. I love you, Dad. Please do not forget me. Do not forget your little girl.

And I am so scared.