saffron & amber
but they are sparce this year
set like the random jewel
amid limbs stiff,
reaching, searching
framing them in borders
of slate & of honey brown.
Hope seems to hover
in the same
waivering manner –
not easily found
but strikingly beautiful
when it is
discovered.
11-12-10
8:25am @ Edgehill Café
to meet with Hillary
Laughter all around
encircling
lilting
gently lapping among china
cup meeting saucer
and the soft chime
of teaspoons stirring.
Voices caress my ear
with contented tones
friend close to friend
and also introductions and geniality.
Somewhere between a cup full
and a cup empty
my heart rate quiets
and slows
to calm.
11-10-10
1:16pm
Savannah Tearoom
It fell -Relentless.
Soaking.
Pitiless.
It drenched my clothes and hair
and filled my shoes.
Once inside my car
it obscured my view
and resounded like
the myriad faults and excuses and fears
that encroached,
swamped,
and threatened to lift roots up
from depth and strength
and bring down
oak firm security
with a towering crash.
But as I listened -
and waited -
I realized that the deluge
was from Him.
Complete.
Healing.
Filling.
Merciful.
Satisfying.
Compassionate.
At the end,
when the rainbow
emerged,
and shimmered across the sky,
and I stood recovered -
I found myself filled with thankfulness
that He remembers
the small defenseless creature
that is
me.
Crossing the road
is always
more difficult
than just gazing down
its limits.
A storm pelts the horizon’s rim,
(I can see the lightning
from here.)
and a remote windchime is carried
to my tingling ears.
Somewhere in this world -
when my singular, precious
time with you was over -
you were led
(probably not with docile steps)
to sheltered moonlit stalls,
where your blue eyes
would peer from the darkness
like sparks
in a furnace.
How often did I laugh,
or just peer cautiously…
wonderingly…
into their icy-white-blue
abyss?
Your coal-black mane
in tangled, hopeless snarls
upon your neck,
soaked up many a tear
and kept me in balance
on many bareback rides -
slipping under wind-stroked
sun-washed
sweet-scented Carolina pines.
No other creature
reacted as you did -
with as much fervor
or head-tossed retaliation to life.
I long stretch my fingers out
to touch you -
to wrap my arms in abandon
around your supple, burnished neck.
I miss those moments
when I knew you were mine.
Shawnee,...
And it seems so long ago.
My heart began to beat loudly and I found that my mouth had become dry.
“I want you to make a promise to me too. I want you to marry Matthew when I’m gone.”...
She said it simply and in a low tone that told me of its pain at another having him, combined with the agony of knowing him alone. Her hands moved slowly over her stomach and I knew that there was also no other that she would rather mother her child.
I sat there speechless— in torment myself. I had never refused Evaleah anything.
The rain began and I took my shawl from my shoulders and covered my head as I continued to hurry toward Evaleah’s cottage. I knew that the miller’s wife, old Mother Trask, would be keeping the baby until I arrived. I wondered where Matthew Craigg would be.
The rain had turned into a downpour as I ran the final stretch under the oaks surrounding the cottage and through its oval-topped door. A modest fire burned at the hearth and my dear friend’s husband lay back in a chair asleep in obvious exhaustion. His face bore none of the hard lines that it held in wakefulness. There were none of the sharp, black glances that his dark eyes could send, only a worn, grief-stunned weariness that pervaded his features as he slept.
He wore a clean, worn black suit and I could see that his normally unkempt hair had been washed and combed. The clock on the mantle said that there were two more hours until they would cover Evaleah in the village churchyard. I looked for Mother Trask, but heard no one else in the cottage. Looking around the parlor, I wondered where the baby might be.
Slipping past Matthew, I discovered the baby in the bedroom, surrounded by pillows on the large cast-iron bedstead. She slept, like her father, in the same troubled sleep, as if she knew that her mother had been taken from her.
Rain pelted the thick leaded windows and I sat by the baby and stroked her short golden curls. On her pillow I saw stitched Evalise— a combination of our names. Tears tumbled onto the carefully prepared baby’s coverlet and I grieved for the gentle spirit that had gone.
For the first time I looked up and saw the headboard that Evaleah’s husband had fashioned from his craft. My breath caught in my throat and I studied it in wonderment.
The sides curved up as if they were wandering vines that sent out small shoots and sprigs of buds. They curled in gently crisscrossing spirals and I stared in amazement realizing the artistry that made up their detail. The buds were smooth and glowed with the buffing that they had received. The leaves curled in different lengths, some as in soft new growth and some as if they were heavy-laden with dew in the early morning. They all curved and intertwined until they met in the center of the headboard in a perfectly formed wild rose.
This was a work that had been fashioned out of love and out of a devotion that made me hold my breath as I followed the molded iron petals with my fingertips. Evaleah had seen a heart that no one else had even imagined.
Evalise stirred and woke. Her velvet-blue eyes met mine and I pulled her from the covers to hold her close to my heart. I looked up and saw that Matthew watched me from the bedroom door.
“It’s time. Mrs. Trask is here to keep the child while we are gone.”
I stood up, wrapped the baby tightly into her blankets again and followed the tall figure in front of me to the open doorway of the cottage. I stood for a moment and looked up into those dark, fierce eyes.
Matthew held out his rough, worn hand and, without hesitating, I took it.
Evaleah’s wild joy at finding that she was with child turned to a fearful despondency as the months left her weaker, paler, less able to see the years ahead. I found her one day curled beside the oak tree that towered over the cottage.
I sat beside her and pulled her up, picking the grass strands from her hair as she sobbed into my skirts. She cried until there seemed to be nothing left and then she looked up from my lap with eyes full of misery.
“Elise, I don’t think that I’ll live to see this baby grow.”
“What? Evaleah, what do you mean, you’re fine, you’re strong.”
I stroked her hair, but as I studied her I saw that she was weaker than I’d ever seen her, and thin beneath her loose, flowered cotton dress. But I attempted to raise her spirits anyway.
“A lot of women become afraid, Evaleah, at this strange new thing in their life, at carrying the child, at the birth…. You will be fine.”
She shook her head and gripped my hand tightly. “No, this feeling is different. It is something that I just know, I can’t explain it. It seems that each day that passes leaves me feeling farther away— as if I’m floating downstream and no matter how hard I paddle, I can’t get back.”
She lay her head back in my lap and watched the clouds pass overhead.
“What does Matthew say?”
Her eyes brimmed again, spilling over onto her white cheeks. “He becomes angry and says that I’ll be alright. He won’t talk about it at all.”
She knew that I became angry myself because she gripped my hand and added; “But it’s only because it frightens him, and it’s so, so hard for someone like him to admit they are afraid, Elise.”
What Evaleah said about slipping away became more evident with each month that followed. The last month before the birth she lay silently in the bedstead that Matthew had wrought from iron that he had pounded in the shed nearby. I had not been back in the bedroom of the cottage since their marriage, and one day when I visited to bring Evaleah soup, I heard her calling weakly from the back for me to come to her.
The small, mullioned windows were thrown open and the afternoon sun spilled onto the worn wood floor as I sat down beside her. For the end of February it was unseasonably warm and birds beyond the window sill sang in voices that made Evaleah smile as she watched the waving buds outside.
“It’s good to see you, Evaleah. I brought you some pastries and some soup that I just made this morning. There is enough for both you and Matthew. How are you today?”
I could see her summon strength to speak and I smoothed the blanket that was stretched over her swollen stomach. “Elise, the baby will be here soon.”
Evaleah’s eyes seemed transparent as they tried weakly to focus on mine. “I need to talk to you very seriously, Elise, please listen to what I have to say.”
I took her hand. “Of course, there’s no doubt that I would listen to anything you had to say. What is it?”
She smiled a smile that told me that she expected argument to whatever she had to tell me. But I squeezed her small, soft hand and waited.
“I want more than anything to see this baby grow up, to love it and to be with Matthew, but I know I can’t, it isn’t possible anymore.”
She weakly raised her hand to stop my eminent words. “Don’t argue with me now, Elise, just listen to me and, remember, when we were little, we promised to always be there for each other. I’ve already spoken to Matthew about this and he’s agreed and promised to do what I’ve asked him.”
She stared into my eyes so deeply that I tried to look away. All of her spare strength she seemed to place into that penetrating gaze.
My heart began to beat loudly and I found that my mouth had become dry.
“I want you to make a promise to me too. I want you to marry Matthew when I’m gone.”
(to be continued)
Five years ago, at nineteen, I had suddenly found myself independent. My uncle died, leaving me his inheritance and I found that no more did I have to do the sewing and mending that had given me subsistence. My parents were gone, my brother at sea, and so it was just myself that kept our family’s cottage together. Before the inheritance, my brother sent whatever he could, which was slim on a sailor’s wages, but with my uncle’s benefits I became free. My freedom meant that if I chose, I need not belong to any man, work the long hours that had kept me from the sunlight before, or deny myself any small luxury that I desired. It was possible that if I invested well, I might travel, might live the life that I had dreamed of and described to Evaleah.
There were many in the village that thought it shameful for me to live alone, a young woman my age. But they soon forgot and I lived in peace. When suddenly one day Evaleah told me that she would be marrying, I trembled for her.
She had not chosen one of the mild, steady sons of the village, but Matthew Craigg, the lone blacksmith who had lived in a broken down shed at the end of the mill road, but who now would be moving in to her cottage. Where he had come from or who his family was, no one knew, and I didn’t like it.
“Evaleah…” I pleaded with her to wait, “Your parents are gone now, just as mine are. I know that you don’t want to be alone, I didn’t at first, but Evaleah— choose carefully!”
She sat very still in the rough wood chair at her hearth. Her eyes, as pale and blue as a clear morning, stared straight into mine and the soft golden locks that framed her face waved gently in the breeze that entered the doorway beside her.
“I couldn’t be more sure, Elise. I’ve loved him for a very long time. I met him four summers ago in the north wood just beyond Ivy Manor’s Pond. I was there hunting berries, and he passing through.” She smiled with remembrance. “We started to talk, somehow… He’s gruff in his own way, not the most sociable in his manners, but…he truly loves me.”
And so I stood beside her in the church. I dared not look past her to the tall, swarthy, muscular man who loomed on the other side of my frail, gentle friend. My heart ached and I wondered what her life was to be.
That next year I didn’t see much of Evaleah. She lived quietly as Mrs. Craigg and they didn’t invite friends to visit.
I knew that I would always be welcome to Evaleah, but I feared her husband with the rough soot-stained hands.
(to be continued)
I could have traced the path with my eyes closed in the darkest of nights, so often had I walked it. It was the way to Evaleah’s cottage.
It was a square, solid structure molded from nearby river stone and held together with beams hand-hewn by Evaleah’s father from the oaks that thickly overhung their long, narrow plot of land. My father was a furniture craftsman in town and I met Evaleah when I rode with him one day to pick up a choice load of oak lumber from Evaleah’s father. As little girls of the same age, we took to one another right away and became the closest of friends.
As we grew up, our families allowed us to be together as often as we liked. Invariably, we found ourselves in Evaleah’s garden. It was our favorite place. She and I would plant flowers and herbs, sail petals down the bordering stream, and talk about what our lives would be. Evaleah wanted a husband and dozens of bright, happy children around her skirts. I asked only for the distant seas, the dirty cobblestones of London— anywhere but our remote village that boasted a yearly fair, four dozen cottages, a few tiny shops and a broken down stone church.
In the garden I loved to grow herbs, pungent and rich; peppermint that bit your tongue and sweet parsley that we threw into the soup that simmered on the hearth. Evaleah’s unwavering favorite from the time we first met was the wild rose. She had a way with them and they grew like the stream that tumbled riotously beside us. She had the wayward vines creeping among the stones of the wall, along the front shutters of the house, everywhere where their roots could catch hold. They thrived on the touches she gave them, it seemed, and flourished.
But today I crossed the crashing waters of the river that edged the village and carried a violent dread in my heart for this particular visit to Evaleah’s more than any I had ever made. The bantering spring morning flung daffodil heads toward my passing skirts, and I breathed in the air that March winds seemed to pull from the moors beyond us and send cutting through the thin curtained windows of the cottages.
Overhead, to the west I could see slate gray thunderheads and I knew that it would rain today at Evaleah’s funeral.
Just yesterday I had taken my sister-friend’s newborn daughter and held her in my arms for the first time.
“Elise, remember…remember what I asked you to do…” Her pale blue eyes held me tightly in their wake. “Do it, Elise, for me…for her.”
What could I say?
(to be continued)
It’s hard to understand
We are angry
Like a parent,
And we areWritten in memory of Nancy Demus and Joshua Ragsdale on 6-30-10
I trace her streets
A church with jewel box grandeur within
cloaked in grim, grey stone -
active even in repose -
gazing down
in a maternal benevolence
onto an ice cream café
filled with laughing strangers
and redolent of cups of café crème.
Beneath tall silent houses
reflecting onto the Seine’s rippling surface
and tree limbs bending over stone quais,
fishermen huddle with rods extended
turning a blind eye to
the sunbather nearby...
tearing a baguette
to eat with cheese, figs and
a slice of crisp buttery chocolate…
The undertow that pulls
me back…
the timeworn pavements that call…
the undeniable, unrelenting grasp
that filled my senses to the brim
as I walked her sidewalks
and breathed her exhaled breezes
still beckons me…
Her stones took seed within me -
flowering in such a way
that no vases are enough
to contain the blossoms
of each smell,
each sight,
each taste remembered.
Wonderful - the Eiffel Tower views.
Graceful with magnificent ease - the curling stairs of Notre Dame
with gargoyles leaning at elbow
and clouds brushing angels wings….
But my thoughts linger
along the Quai d’Orléans
and letting them drift back
my heart rests.
Written 6-28-10
I see them
as they pass by me on the street,
smile over a church aisle,
wave from captured photos…
every day…
young,
vulnerable,
and longing to be mature…
to be protected… held close…
cherished and chosen…
desiring freedom….longing to be released,
liberated,
without restraint.
To soar beyond exacting, unbending barriers
yet rest surrounded by solicitude and tender worry…
We all struggle and itch
to shed the snug binding skin
that enwraps us from birth.
We wrestle with the emerging wings
that endeavor to break
free.
Then there comes that day
when we become aware
that we are walking down
a silent pathway -
that we clutch our arms close
to our panting breasts
and ache for the arms that will enfold us…
To find the touch and embrace
that will keep us
and tether our feet
groundward –
To locate the eyes that
will tender forgiveness –
The heart that beats
for Truth –
is a search that
whispers & beckons
us forward.
And our search
becomes
relevant…
relentless…
real…
The cost
is extravagantly
minimal.
To give ourselves
to the Giver
is - in itself -
without measure
or price
yet costs us
everything.
Everything
that is
us.
Written 6-25-10
