Rock My World

Stone is the face of patience.       

Mary Oliver 

Even rocks have stories to tell,

deep old stories of time passing through eons, 

slow and fast moving water 

shape the stones over millennia. 

I have such a stone, ancient, from a creek bed in the Colorado Rockies. 

It fills my whole hand with its weightiness. 

Hefty. It feels hefty.

The color of dusky charcoal with white threadlike veins running around it,

tracing the paths of its life, telling the earth's story. But my stone has another story; the story of how it came into my life in the summer of 1982 during a family vacation through the west. 

My husband, our ten-year-old son and I had climbed an easy sloping mountain where we sat, all three of us, hushed by the beauty of it all, the vastness from on high. The only sound, the flapping of a bird's wings. We sat in awed silence for a while, we three, with our own thoughts before we made our way back down the mountain. Our son, always fearless, made it down way ahead of us. It seemed like we all were craving continued silence as we went our separate ways to explore the creek bed, remaining within sight of each other, but feeling no need to talk. 

The creek was lively, yet easy to navigate. As I waded the shallow waters, the rock caught my eye. It was sitting there alone, glistening, serene, tempting. I moved to pick it up, but hesitated for a second, not wanting to disturb it in its ancient bed. In the silence it seemed to call me; a connection on a cellular level that has stayed with us for 32 years.  

She's a good traveler. (I think of her as female.) There is always room for her in my suitcase. She went to Scotland with me where I picked up a couple of traveling companions, two pieces of green marble from Iona. On a tour of the Isle of Coll, we saw formations of gneiss, some of  the oldest rock on earth. I think she felt at home there. 

I look at her every day. I hold her every day. She  has been a silent witness to my journey. She's seen every emotion it's possible for a human to have. Sometimes I look to her for answers. She never has any. What she does have when I hold her in my hand is solidity. She takes me right back to that ancient silence, which gives me the space to be calm and focused. It's her never-ending gift to me. One that I never take for granted. 

The few steady influences in my life are very precious to me. She has been a most steadfast presence. She doesn't judge. She abides. 

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

Melon Memories

I will never taste cantaloupe
without tasting the summers
you peeled for me and placed 
face-up on my china breakfast plate. 

Voices  - Naomi Shihab Nye

Sun-soaked cantaloupes smell of summer, rain, dew and earthy ridges. Melon memories make me smile.  They were a staple of our summer fare, along with corn on the cob and fresh sliced tomatoes still warm from the garden. I see my grandma holding the melon in one tiny hand and a scary-sharp knife in the other. She could peel and slice a melon in the time it took my mouth to start watering.

When I was a kid we called them musk melons. We ate them sliced and halved, rarely cubed. Cubing was an unnecessary delay. In my family we salted and peppered our melons, just enough to pull their ripe juiciness to the surface.

Cantaloupes were part of our beach fare. I loved letting the juice of each slice run down my chin and arms;  and then, after giving my little brother a threatening look that said stay away from my melon, I would race to the water, rinse off and come back for more.

Sometimes when my dad made my plate, he would lay a slice of melon on its side like a smile with two maraschino cherries for eyes and a miniature marshmallow for a nose.

Cantaloupe was one of the few things connected with my family that has only happy memories. We all loved melon and ate it with joy and gusto. Eating this luscious fruit with my family created alchemical moments where all pettiness and hurt was forgotten. And when we had finished every last bight, we were too full to care about anything except a nap. 

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

History of Tears

Every place I’ve ever visited has dropped a pebble in my pocket, history dripping like tears from their thick skins.

Everything I’ve Ever Known- Amy Christman

History of Tears                                                                                                                 

I have always known my mother’s tears, at times felt like I was drowning in them, tears that could appear on demand. Nobody could work up to a good cry like her.

Tears to persuade, to evoke sympathy, to beg us not to leave, but made us want to flee, tears that kept her permanent victimhood intact, tears that cried wolf once too often.

The second anniversary of her death was in February. I’ve had no tears for her- only hope in my heart that she is at long last at peace. Hope that her chaotic, fear-based way of being is no longer a part of her. I knew that death would be her only way to rest, to find peace and, hopefully, joy.  My wish for her is that there are no facades on the other side of the veil, no masks to wear. Let those spinning plates of appearance, pride, hurt, and secrets float off into the beautiful beyond.

I wish all good things for her. She deserves them after a lifetime of choices that wouldn’t allow her to trust the right people, choices that called her fears to her, choices that resulted in a rigid belief system.  A lifetime believing love was finite, that if those of us who loved her, and there were many, loved others there would never enough love for left for her. But there was always love, Mother. Always and still.

Rebekah for The Poplar Grove Muse

Logophile

I am a lifelong Logophile, a lover of words.  Words have been my friends for as long as I can remember. Before I learned to read I remember watching my mother, lost in reading her paperbacks and my dad being totally engrossed in his newspaper. I couldn’t wait to find out what that was all about

As I was growing up, I’m sure my family thought I was lying on my bed reading. But I was actually in England in a haunted mansion, or in Egypt excavating the tombs and reading hieroglyphics, or following Mowgli and Baloo through the jungle.  Words transported me to someplace else, which was exactly where I needed to be.

 I love the way words wrap themselves around your ears and touch your soul.Words spoken or written have the power to heal, wound, inspire and incite.  They change our world. Adolph Hitler used words to incite a whole country to commit atrocities that went against their very nature.  Randy Pausch inspired people to face death with grace and positivity, but to also live life to the fullest in his book The Last Lecture.  Jane Austen made young girls everywhere believe that true love was possible even if the odds were against them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle turned us into amateur sleuths after reading Sherlock Holmes. Social media, through Tweeting and Facebook connected people who were determined to overthrow a corrupt leader in Egypt. 

Words matter. As is evidenced in our schools with all the bullying that is going on today. I remember my mother never allowing anyone to call me “Red”. She didn’t want me to be diminished by a nickname that only spoke to the color of my hair and not who I really was. In grade school some boys would say to me, “I’d rather be dead than red on the head”. This gave me permission to chase them around the playground and show them how weak they were in the running department.

The word vagina can titillate a room full of women who were born with one when they were asked to ponder, “What was my vagina doing in 1988?”

Sometimes our own words can come back to bite us in the butt, for instance, when we make statements like  I would never…

We begin learning at a very early age how to be effective communicators with our words and how we use them.  My son learned early on that whining got him nowhere. 

Everyday I receive A. Word. A. Day  from: https://www.google.com/#q=wordsmith+anagram

I’m still learning.

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

I dress every morning in my dead dad's sweater.

After dad died, mom asked every offspring, and there are seven of us, to take anything of our father's. Her heart was in pieces and this made the parting with his things a tiny bit easier.

 I shook my head at the shelf of birthday and holiday gifts given by me that were never worn. All those Dad gifts left neatly folded and unused. He was always the hardest to buy for since he never expressed a need for much in this mortal life. Any material needs appeared as weaknesses in his manly world. There were scarves, gloves, sweater vests, slippers, socks, blah, blah, blah most with tags still in place. 

     I took a grey cotton, zippered, cabled cardigan. I had often seen him wear this comfy looking sweater. His casual home uniform sans tie was a plaid shirt, yellow sweater vest and this grey sweater that made his quickly disappearing, silver hair shine.  I wear this totem every morning and every night especially those evenings you get into pajamas extra early to just declare: "day is over, i"m doin' nothin' the rest of this day". It fits me perfectly.

     My dad was an ex-marine bird colonel, always physically fit, walking every day after the earliest mass, especially after his coronary incident. He was an exceedingly disciplined man. He drank no stimulants: coffee, tea, alcohol, or sugary soft drinks. He never ate between meals. He loved hot chocolate and ice cream, which became sherbet post-coronary bypass.  He wore a medium but really a 'small' fit his frame better, especially as the average guy got larger with our fast food culture. He sired several children over six feet including one daughter. None of us wore anything small. But the move from men sizes to my womanly frame made this sweater fit just right.

     I hope some of his discipline will ooze into me via cardigan osmosis. But other than immediately going thru an old yoga routine every morning, I have little of his 24/7 vigilance and overdrive ambition. He retired from two jobs, had three very different careers (family mortician, career military, finally business professor). Dad fought in two wars, published one book and had 7 children and one wife. He never watched TV, but for Notre Dame football. Instead, he worked hard on articles for his various military alumni units. He had received his PhD at night while teaching at various war colleges throughout the east coast and was often stationed at the Pentagon. Dad was always studying something.  If we could only live our lives his way, we would have been better people. We were all college educated at much personal sacrifice. Education was THE one true thing; " communists can't take that away from you. If it 's in your head, it will stay," he would chant.

    

     Much useful and useless knowledge is dementedly stuck in my head, but maybe with his silver sweater wrapped around me, Dad's remembered steadfastness will help me greet the day with a starving dog's appetite for meat and end it with a satisfied mothers' sigh for her perfectly peaceful sleeping child. It is said that ‘clothes make the man,’ perhaps his sweater will help his still dutiful daughter.

Carole for PGM