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Indigo Vales

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Indigo Vales

Tag Archives: loss

(Turn, Turn, Turn)

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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birds, cicada, family, glass already broken, loss, mistakes, moon, pain, philosophy, season, Serenity prayer, the Byrds, Wheel, writing

I begin this morning that could feel like I’m sifting through a house fire, blackened, burned, sopping wet, heartbroken, but I am determined to hold my head up and say this is a new day, one I begin with raw skin and foal’s legs, and I will make something good of it.

I begin this morning clinging to a philosophy, one that says my favorite glass that sits on the shelf is already broken.

I begin this morning clinging to the serenity prayer that tells me to accept the things I cannot change.

I begin this morning better than I left yesterday. I was overwhelmed. I tore my house apart looking for something I’d lost. I cried. I still cry.  I slept, unable to face the everything that came down on me because it’s clearly gone.  One small loss drew in a lifetime of loss, like some magnet that attracts black matter, black star, black planet, a life implodes, and yet I still get to choose how to face this minute, and the next and the next.  I saw all your faces, I relived all your hearts and every mistake I ever made that hurt you and hurt me. I slept and I survived.

Things happen all around me and I didn’t always notice.  I’ve been trying to get better at observing and writing to understand.  When I was a kid we would visit our grandparents in the Garden State of New Jersey, land of the farms and high tension lines.  I used to collect cicada shells in those late summer days, carefully plucking their delicate bodies clamped to a tree and putting their husks in a coffee can. Quite a pile. They had a unique smell almost akin to ancient books in a back room library but with a whiff of life that is begone. Until recently, cicada always meant “summer sound, dormant, collect husks for fun.”  Once we brought a cicada home, kept it in an aquarium and watched as it broke through its old body and became wetly new, expanding, growing, alive, astonishing colors!   We put it on a pine outside when we knew it was time.  It never made a sound, and I never saw it fly away, yet what a gift we received that day.  Here, there are cicada who made their home in the pine tree across from my door.  They react to birds invading their branches, the cicada fly away (actually flying! away!) and come back when the bird is gone. The needles even shake when their heavy, black bodies depart!  And when they are comfortable, they sound like my dad’s radial arm saw, calling calling calling all summer day until dark.

I never knew cicada could be so proactive. Their large, black bodies are busy in ways I never saw before.  Meanwhile, I have to decide what is more important this morning: Life ever changing, words and images I lost yet I have the time and the place and the ability to write about everything, with everything I’ve got right now.  Cicada know it’s all on the table and it’s now or never. They give it their all.  And I don’t want to be a dried husk stuck to a pine tree with no story to tell.

Do cicada grieve? Do slow-motion butterflies who pass by the pines care?  I don’t know. All I know is that the finches will be back next year to make several noisy baby broods, gulls will patrol the shore for unfortunate fry, and the moon will be bright in my winter window.

A Tired Morning

06 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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Tags

books, dream, father, loss, work

Some nights, it feels like the dream will never end, and when I wake I am already tired.  Then I read emails and the 800-pound tired sits with me on the bed leaving me in stunned silence with a decision to make: flop back down to try and seek another hour’s rest in hot, strong sunlight or get up and get moving. Guess I chose to get up and work through the morning.

I’d known her for a long time. She was my friend, someone I used to work with. She was so very tall and big… a big girl (this is no lady) this girl with long, fair brown hair. (She reminds me of someone I knew in another life.)  She was in tank top and shorts, and she was leaving. And she left. All I remember right now is feeling heart-hurt for the loss, and that feeling seemed to go on for a long time.

The next part of the dream (or maybe a different one entirely, who knows it carried on so long) found me in a parking lot outside a very large industrial building. Looks like it’d been there awhile, the usual dents and creases, rust, and spots of paint paler where they scoured off some graffiti. I had one job to do. (Can you hear the meme? I sure could.)  I had one job, and it seemed like nothing and no one wanted to cooperate and help me get this 55-gallon blue poly drum on a pallet, into a truck, and shipped to its destination. One drum. What was in it? Where was it going? I have no idea, but the job was all-consuming to me.  I went inside the building to get a bill of lading to get this process going. The cavernous room was poorly lit. Girders and beams covered in dark masses of cobwebbed dust in the high ceiling. It was quiet inside.  Several really wide, long wooden tables were centered in the room covered in papers. Most of the papers had already been written on. Everything was a disorganized mess. All I needed was one blank bill of lading, and I couldn’t find one anywhere on or below the tables. Another co-worker, I’ll call her “Cindy” was there also flipping through papers, and now I can see a bunch of guys in tank tops, white towels hanging around their necks because they were hot, just standing around not doing a thing.

My cellphone (an old flip phone) goes off. It’s my dad. He wants to know if I shipped out those books yet. Apparently he told his co-workers he would arrange to have some books brought in so they could have something to read, like a small exchange. The books are piled high on a pallet in my building for some reason. I was supposed to know who’s book belonged to who, and ship them. The books are old, worn, faded jackets scuffed and torn on the edges, titles no one would recognize, books that you walk past at flea markets. Instead of me shipping the barrel in the back of my mind, now I’m opening book covers, looking for names and addresses and there’s nothing there. Another impossible task. I’m angry and verbally abusing my father (not yelling) but saying awful things to him about this problem he handed me. It’s his fault that I can’t get this task done, why is this my problem, on and on and on. And he just stayed on the line and took it.

I awoke feeling tired and terrible for yelling at my dad. I know it’s just a dream, one that means so very many things. Waking up feeling tired and terrible isn’t the worst thing I suppose. I would read far worse things soon enough, and deal with the day and this sadness hour by hour. Another hot, humid day where the sky is sweating on us. I’d like to go back and dream up some rain.

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