gather ’round the fire and let me tell you a story
Sleep takes me, unawares. For just a second, I dream.
But in that second, a whole world blooms.
Beginning to End, Alpha to Omega,
All of existence, all of experience,
A lifetime in one second.
My child makes a noise, drawing me out.
Out of my fleeting dream-world.
and back into this world,
where a lifetime takes a lifetime to pass.
Monkey safely ensconced in school, Pumpkin and I walked home in the chill morning. Her caramel-colored ringlets curled all around the edge of her little pink hoodie. She stopped to pick a flower still closed and dewy. We walked on for about another half block and she looked up at me and said, “When I was a little butterfly, I will go flying!” (Verb tense is not her strong suit, she’s 3.) I said, “You will go flying?” She said, “Yes!” and then, “I will go flying up to space!”
Another poet in the House of The Burning Prairie. I am a proud mama.
Many years ago, before we got married, Hubby and I worked together. We met while working at a local art supply store–I worked customer service and he worked in the warehouse. My job was to take customer orders over the phone, fill the orders (except for the large items), and pass those orders off to future-Hubby to be packaged and delivered.
The warehouse area was, well, informal would be the nice way to put it. Honestly, I don’t know how we got any work done. It was the opposite of a hostile work environment, it was more like a giddy work environment. There seemed to be some kind of comedic oneupmanship competition going on; and I just happened to be on the receiving end of that contest one day.
Here’s some background–I am one of those unfortunate souls who seems to be wearing an invisible “kick me” sign. I’ve worn it all my life. So many people have teased me, picked on me, harassed me, and tormented me that I have become somewhat of a reluctant expert on the subject of teasing. People would often try to console me be telling me “Oh, he only teases you because he likes you!” or “She’s just jealous.” Nice try, Mom.
I can always tell when someone is teasing me because he or she genuinely likes me. Frequently, teasing is how some individuals relate to most people, but they only bother to tease those they like. The teasing is not mean-spirited, it is often gentle or funny or madcap. Future-Hubby and the rest of the boys in the warehouse teased me because they liked me and I was (and still am) short and goofy, and I reliably give the precise reactions teasers are just aching to get. I really need to work on that one.
Anyway, I always carried the customer order forms on a clipboard while I filled the orders. One ill-fated day, like so many other days, (cue the suspenseful music) I put my clipboard down on a table in the warehouse and left it unattended. Little did I know the horror that was to come.
Future-Hubby and some of the boys had found a crawdad carcass and were having some very juvenile fun sneaking it into each others’ work spaces. I was blissfully unaware of all of this behavior. Until.
Until future-Hubby got the bright idea to slip it onto the one place I couldn’t miss it, my clipboard. (To his eternal credit, he debated and then discarded the nefarious idea to perch the thing on top of my Dr. Pepper can.) He thought I would squeal and maybe flap my hands and dance around a bit. Ha!!!! I showed him!
When I rounded the corner by the table and saw this alien creature crawling (I didn’t know it was dead) on my clip board, I freaked. I let loose with a blood-curdling scream that brought people running from the front of the store. And caused the nice older gentleman who ran the delivery drivers to clutch his chest and proclaim, “What’s wrong with that kid!?” He then had to go home for the rest of the day to rest his poor heart. (He was just fine later.) The culprits were pretty easy to spot, future-Hubby and one of the boys were laughing their butts off.
In the years since, Hubby and I have enjoyed sneaking up on and scaring each other, but nothing has quite satisfied my desire for revenge. Until last night.
The kids had been dragging stuff out of the front closet, including my vacuum cleaner, and there was a stray piece of paper right in front of that closet. I bent down to pick it up and got quite a start. A very large, very dead spider was on the paper. It was on its back, spindly legs up, looking for all the world like the creature that wrapped itself around John Hurt’s face in “Aliens”. I swept up the scary thing and put it the trashcan.
It was right on top, where it could not be missed! Hubby is terrified of spiders. As I stood plotting and contemplating, a wicked, grinchy smile lit my face with its infernal light. After 18 years I would finally have my revenge! Bwa-ha-ha! I literally and gleefully rubbed my hands together in sweet anticipation, not for nothing does Hubby call me his Evil Pixie!
As I thought of fun ways to get him to open the trashcan, I had time to re-think. Then I decided that the sweetness of my cold dish of revenge would be utterly ruined by the inevitable trip to the emergency room for Hubby’s resulting chest pains. So, with deep regret, I decided to take the high road. When Hubby came back in, I warned him about the spider.
But I did tell him about my wicked plot and exactly why I plotted it! Which was almost as much fun as carrying it out would’ve been. Almost. Hubby hadn’t thought about the infamous crawdad incident in years so he enjoyed the reminder. In fact, he had to tell me the whole story from his perspective yet again. As if I wasn’t there at the time!
One of these days, though, one of these days. I will have my revenge. Does anyone know where I can buy a bucket of live crawdads?
There is a dark, primal place in everyone. It is a place where we store our animal instincts, our violent impulses, and our reservoirs of strength. This place remains largely hidden behind social conventions and buried under the bland pleasantries of everyday life. But when we need to tap into that place it is there. And sometimes, when we aren’t prepared for it, that dark space comes roaring to the surface.
I was caught unawares today.
When you live in Oklahoma it’s just smart to keep a weather eye open all the time. And I’m not just talking about being aware of one’s surroundings. No, I mean actually paying attention to the weather. Listen to the radio, check online, watch the news. And that’s just what I was doing, watching the news. But not really paying too much heed until the weather forecast started. Until an unfortunately familiar story caught at the edges of my consciousness.
A tragedy struck, in a tiny town south of here, the day after my birthday. Two young girls, walking a well-traveled and familiar route, were shot and killed with no apparent motive. There is something on the news almost nightly, as no suspect has yet been identified. I paid attention long enough to find that the situation had not changed, then went back to my book or computer or whatever else I was doing. Pumpkin was sitting on the back of the couch, brushing my hair. I was further distracted by the almost rhythmic beat of brush bristles on my scalp.
Today they released the taped 911 call one of the girls’ grandmother made when she found them. Law enforcement is hoping to flush out more leads with this release. It was horrific. I read along with the transcript as I listened, now fully alert. She cried and screamed, the last thing on the tape was, “My babies!” It was a howl of grief and rage torn from that primal space at the very pit of the soul.
Then the strangest thing happened. A second howl rose to match the one on the tape, echoing in the room. I realized that the howl was mine just as great barking sobs were torn from my chest, filling my mouth. The wordless anger and sorrow escaping my mouth in howls, barks, and roars would have been familiar to my earliest ancestresses, the ones barely more than dumb animals, the cave-painters, the gatherers.
At that moment, I was the mother wolf howling, in sympathetic outrage, with her pack; I was the mother bear roaring to protect her cubs. And then I felt one of my own little cubs, still tap-tap-tapping on my head with her brush. I leaned into her and she hugged my head; and I heard my other, bigger cub playing noisily in his room. Through the left-over tears, I told her I loved her and received one big, gooey, suction-y kiss.
I know this, if there is any mother out there shielding this crime, who is not moved to action by that grandmother’s howl, then she is not of my pack.
�
I have a ghost for a pet,
Although I haven’t seen him yet.
I know he’s there, I feel his stare,
And feel his cold breath in my hair.
Can you hear him give a knock?
Did you see him throw that rock?
What is that sound, you may well ask it,
Why it’s my pet, out of his casket.
He may cause some trouble,
When he turns my house to rubble,
But from my pet, I won’t be freed,
Because this one I don’t have to feed.
Now, don’t be scared, or a little sick,
Just watch out for his latest trick.
�
He’s not so nice, this pet of mine,
And sometimes he’s quite infantine.
I hear him moan out in the hall,
And throw things against the wall.
He even made my auntie fall,
“Down the stairs!” I heard her call.
No, he isn’t very nice, my pet,
But still, I haven’t seen him yet.
If you see him, let me know,
Oh, you say you have to go?
I really do understand,
Sometimes he does get out of hand.
I’m really sorry he dumped that sand,
I hope he didn’t ruin your purse,
But now you comprehend my curse.
�
�
It’s not my fault,
I told him, “Halt!”
But he doesn’t listen well,
Even when I yell and yell.
Pardon my ghost, he means no harm,
He already bought the farm.
Not for him, the spirit plane,
So he seeks to be my bane.
But he doesn’t know me yet,
My silly little ghostly pet.
I want him here, I really do,
But that is just my point of view.
If he stays, he’ll do his share,
There are folks I wish he’d scare.
�
�
So when you visit, if you dare,
Take some caution, take some care,
And always, always please beware,
Of my naughty, little, ghostly pet,
The one I haven’t seen quite yet.
�
�
The sun sets so late now that I am hardly ever out after dark. All of us are usually home by 7 or 8, so we can get the kids into bed by 9. Right now when I put my daughter to bed there is still the barest hint of day in the Western sky and her room is dim instead of dark. That transitional time between sunset and night, The Blue Hour as it is often called, is my favorite time of day. It is the gloaming. Gloaming creeps out like a cat, to soften the dying light and lend an air of unreality where even the harsh and ugly is rendered kindly.
When I am stuck indoors at the gloaming, I pine to be outside and when I am outside, I ache for those few magic minutes to stretch into hours. So it was that I found myself out and about at my favorite time of day/night. It was just a short trip to the grocery store for the mundane things of life, but it is always thus. For me, it is the ordinary tasks of life that lead to extraordinary insights.
As I drove I could see houses lighting up from the inside. Do the people inside wait until nearly dark to pop on the lights or do they leave them on all day, only to become visible in the dark? And I happened to see an architectural feature I’ve noticed before. Picture windows.
Exactly who is supposed to see the picture? Is it for the people inside; do they look out their picture windows only to see the house across the street, with its own picture window? Or is the picture for those outside; pictures of what goes in inside? They do frequently allow us to see vignettes of other lives.
My House doesn’t have one of these curious things. The parts of our House that face the street are bedrooms and are very closed-in and private. The entire back of the House is a glass wall, completely open, but only to the back yard. We would have to work pretty hard to let passers-by see into our lives. A lot of other houses in our neighborhood were built at the height of the picture window-era. And we often see glimpses inside, as we are driving or walking by.
Maybe we get to see bustling scenes of people going about their daily lives: having dinner, watching television, playing, fighting. Often we see curtains open to show off a static room, quiet and still as if it were frozen in amber. Humans rarely grace these rooms, except to dust the plastic plants or fluff pillows that have no need of fluffing. Children are never allowed in these rooms, and really, there is nothing for children to do there. The only reason children would even go in there is to see Mom turn just that exact shade of purple.
It is the stuffiest, dullest room in the house, one that only adult guests are subjected to, possibly as a form of veiled hostility. Mom says it is a room for a company, but it isn’t. She resents their presence as well, this is a room in which the only acceptable “guests” are those outside of it. You are to admire it from afar, to gaze in wonder at its lifeless perfection. These often tiny rooms have nothing to do with the way people live, they are disconnected from family life. And I feel a shiver of delicate horror whenever I see these dead spaces.
This striving for perfection is understandable, and impossible. I, too, would love to have one room stay clean for longer than a few hours. But I just don’t have the space to spare to say, “Look, the rest of my life may be chaos, but this room always stays perfect.” If I did have an extra room it would be a playroom, an office, a sewing and ironing room, a workout room. It would not be a dead space.
What kind of picture would I want people to see? A moving picture, a snapshot of daily life, or time-lapse pictures in which to see my children grow up. But I think I will skip the still-life, with its cut flowers, rotting fruit, and ever-present death.
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Not too many years back, the governor issued burn ban after burn ban because of the wildfires ripping through our state. I live in midtown, but some of the fires got close enough to town for us to smell them in our backyard. The very air left the taste of charcoal at the back of my throat. Years of drought had turned the prairie into a tinderbox. Ranchers were suffering, but many generous folks from out of state donated hay so their animals could eat.
At the same time the prairie was burning, I began writing again. Thus the name of my blog. One of my closest-held dreams when I was young was to be a writer. But life intervened and I never got around to making that dream come true. Years later, when I was sure that I had expended all my creativity to create two beautiful children, I found my voice again. In blogging.
How I wish that I had know about this during that first horrid, post-partum-depression-wracked year after my son was born. (Or that blogging had even existed during the five years I battle infertility.) But I remained ensconced in my milky isolation, never even guessing how many mothers were out there, mothers who felt just like I did.
Now, after the fires and during the deluge, here am I, writing free. Free of those who actively discouraged me from writing for a living, free of those who simply did not care to stand in my corner, free of concern for how others (even family) see me.
The earth is lush and green and soggy with ideas. The temperatures are kind and the air scrubbed clean by the constant rain. Now all I need is summer’s bright promise to see what will bloom.
The wind has really been sweeping down the plains this week, blowing the trees back and forth. More limbs have fallen out of the trees, shaken from their tenuous holds by these seasonable winds. Today, as I was walking the kids up to the playground, we noticed that the grass was getting kind of long. Monkey pointed and yelled, “Look at the grass!” I replied, “Yeah, it looks like it’s waving.” Then he said, “No, the grass looks like it’s dancing!”
Did I spawn a poet or what?
“Do angels walk among us?” The question never varied in its essence, only in its particulars. This time, the author of the latest bestseller about angels asked the question.
Veronica studied the woman, who went by the highly improbable name of Serendipity Fogg. Ms. Fogg was somewhere between 40 and 50 years old, with just the slightest hint of age showing in the creases around her eyes and the slightly wobbling flesh under her chin. She wore the uniform of too many New Age writers—long Indian-print skirt, loose tank-top style blouse in matching painted silk, chunky indeterminate-ethnic jewelry, and ugly sandals. Serendipity wore her doe-brown hair in a long, shiny curtain to her waist. It seemed to be the woman’s one concession to vanity. Her face was completely bare of make-up; and she had taken no measures to remove the beginnings of a faint moustache.
Ah well, Veronica sighed to herself, this part of her trip was wasted. This woman did not possess any more knowledge or wisdom than had any of the others. Crossing the country, she had met with preachers, dreamers, charlatans, and madmen. All claimed to have seen or been visited by angels. But none of them had. Except, maybe the poor, mad ones. There was no way to tell what secrets truly hid inside those tortured minds.
It had been too long, years maybe, since she had met anyone else like her. Oh, there were plenty of people who talked about angels, or collected angel images, or fantasized about angels. Whole little societies had sprung up around the idea of angels. These angel enthusiasts could be found in catholic bookstores, metaphysics classes, New Age shops, and the big chain bookstores when authors came to sign their newest angel books. Tonight was just such a night; the bookstore was crammed with angel enthusiasts. Veronica thought of them as addicts, there to get their fix of angel lore, enough to tide them over until the next book was published or the next photograph of an angel-shaped light or cloud was passed around.
She liked to come to these things when she wasn’t working, but tonight she had a job to do, her mission was here somewhere. Veronica scanned the angel-loving crowd, looking for just the right kind of face, the correct look in someone’s eye, the glow that says “I have been chosen,” even if that person doesn’t know he or she has been chosen. So many years (decades?) on the job had given Veronica a finely honed intuitive sense for her quarry.
The message this time was short, she shouldn’t have to spend a long time delivering it, but time meant very little to Veronica and she didn’t do anything halfway. A creature of excellence, she would make sure the recipient of the message fully understood and knew just which way to go.
Since time was always on her side, and since her intended hadn’t shown up yet, Veronica decided to have a little, harmless fun. She rose up two inches off the floor and glided over to the line to meet the author. Not one of the dozens of angel fanatics noticed her feet hovering ever so slightly above the floor. Just as she reached Ms. Fogg’s table she spotted her mission. It was a young woman this time, one wearing the nametag of an employee. The young woman was patiently answering a customer’s questions, so Veronica had a few minutes to spare.
Serendipity Fogg greeted her with the same pale pleasantries that everyone else had received. No spark of recognition, not even a glimmer of real interest. For all Ms. Fogg’s New Age pretensions, Veronica knew she stood before a stout non-believer. And she felt offended for all the other people there, the ones who really did believe in angels.
I’ll show her to toy with people’s dearly held beliefs, Veronica said to herself. And as the author reached out to shake just another admirer’s hand, Veronica the Wayfinder decided to show her the way. Dodging the offered hand, she instead touched her finger to Serendipity’s forehead, just at the third eye. “Now you can see,” said the Wayfinder.
Before the author had time to respond, Veronica slipped away. She had spotted her mission, who was alone for the moment, so she cornered the young woman. “Ana, I’ve come to tell you that it is time to go home.”
Confused, the woman looked at her and said, “Uh, no. I’m not scheduled to leave until 9 pm.”
“No, Anasazi, it is time for you to return to where you belong. I have been sent to tell you this. There was one place where you felt truly at home, you need to go back there.” The girl wasn’t answering so Veronica continued, “I was told that you would understand, that you have wanted to go back for years. It is time.”
The young woman shook her head and worked to refocus her eyes. This stranger’s voice had reached deep into her head and made her think of Post, the town she had left a decade before. Ten years had passed in a blur of dead-end jobs, half-hearted friendships, and failed romances. Her heart had ached for years, lonely for a place to call home. But Post?
She had ignored all the people who told her she would come back. That Post would always be her home. But now Ana knew that they were right, had been right from the very beginning. It was time to go home. Home to Post.
Veronica knew all these thoughts, could see them written plainly on Ana’s face. But something still seemed to trouble her.
Touching the nametag on her chest, the one that read simply “Ana”, she asked, “How do you know my full name? Nobody but my mother calls me that, and then it’s only when she’s angry. Nobody knows that name!”
The Wayfinder just smiled and said, “He does.” Then Veronica turned and left, still hovering just above the floor.
From that night forward, Ms. Serendipity Fogg dropped her pen name and started using her birth certificate name again. As a writer, Mildred Fogg was nowhere near as popular as Serendipity had been but as a person, she was happier. Now she could see all the wonderful things that really did exist in the world. And never again did she have to ask if angels walked among us, because she could see them. Sometimes they were angels all the time, sometimes they masqueraded as humans, but most of the time, the angels Mildred saw were real people doing angelic things for others.
As for Ana, she found her way back home.
Cottonwood is an abomination. I know some of you out there may disagree with me about this devil-tree, but what are you nuts!?! I stepped out the door today and for the first time in a week I didn’t feel like an extra in Legend. This time of year I start sneezing when I look out the window and see the cottonwood fuzz drifting through the yard. Some of those fuzzies destined to become new devil-trees, some weakly clinging at the edges of lawns and curbs, but most seem to be sent directly towards me to make my eyes water, my nose itch, and my sinuses swell up like over-filled water balloons.
Since the age of nine, I have been plagued by allergies-seasonal and year-round, indoor and outdoor, air-borne and contact. But springtime and autumn have typically brought the most agony per day for me. In one of my many half-hearted attempts at diary-keeping I wrote “Sick with allergies” day after day after day. Finally, I stopped writing about being sick and wrote when I finally felt better.
Many people think hay fever doesn’t actually involve fever, but frequently in my case it did. This is not without precedence–allergic reactions are the body’s immune response to harmless substances. It is a hyper-response considering the generally benign nature of the allergens in question. But is it the exact same immune system that also responds to pathogens, so the symptoms can mimic those of viral infections. Including a febrile response.
Anyway, I quickly developed severe symptoms–sneezing, sinus swelling, congestion, asthma, hives, swollen and watery eyes. I adjusted my life around my allergies. Sequestering myself inside an air-conditioned house or car, avoiding strange animals, carrying an inhaler at all times, trying every new allergy prescription that came out. And often, it wasn’t enough. Every spring seemed to train its full arsenal on me, I was starting to take it personal.
As I got older things calmed down. Instead of the full gauntlet, I’d get hit with one or two foul symptoms per season. Then something beautiful happened to me-I got pregnant! The natural immuno-suppressant effects of pregnancy (the ones that keep your body from treating the fetus as a pathogen) kicked in and totally kept my body from over-reacting to pollen! Oh, and the baby was pretty cool, too. Two and a half years later came baby number two. All the while I was still convinced that I finally had a permanent reprieve from all my many allergies. But. Isn’t there always a but?
But, my “reprieve” after the babies were born had very little to do with finally out-growing my allergies and everything to do with climate control. Air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned store and back again. All for the sake of keeping babies comfortable and safe. Silly me. I found out the folly of my assumptions when I started walking Monkey to school last fall.
Tulsa is one of the absolute worst places for allergy-sufferers but I have lived other places and haven’t found a significant difference. If the pollen doesn’t get to me, the air pollution will. And this year must be a terrible year, because all of a sudden Hubby is having a time of it.
When I was growing up my mother had terrible hay fever and Dad was convinced it was all in her head. Then as she got older, her symptoms become a lot less severe, but guess who’s got worse? Yep, Dad’s. Now that I’m older and have been dealing with this for so long, my symptoms are considerably better, but guess who’s have gotten worse? Yep, Hubby’s.
Not to say that Hubby wasn’t sympathetic or anything. I just don’t think he had a real understanding of this seasonal misery, unfortunately the poor guy does now. Bless his heart.
Oh, by the way, if any of you are planting any trees this year, for the love of everything holy DO NOT PLANT THE DEVIL’S OWN TREE!!!!! Please. Cottonwood sucks.
