Home Again

It was late in my 17th year as I walked through a sorority dorm at ENMU that I caught the soul-searching song of Carole King drifting down the hallway:
Snow is cold, rain is wet, chills my soul right to the marrow.
I won't be happy till I see you alone again, till I'm home again and feeling right.
She had me at Snow.
Those lyrics came back to me yesterday.
A bride and her groom stood before me and I needed somehow to explain to them the amazing power of this thing called love which they were just now professing before God and a great cloud of witnesses.
Just then it began to snow.
This bride's father had died in a snowy car crash years hence and his ashes were interred on the hill above my little church. In our counseling sessions she explained that having the wedding here was the closest she could come to him walking her down the aisle. She told me she would have the photographer snap pictures of her on the hill by his crypt and our wedding coordinator warned her that it might be snowy and if she did such a thing her dress could get stained as she made her way up the trail.
She said she hoped it did snow. Her best memories were of playing with her dad in the Colorado snow....
Snow is cold, rain is wet, chills my soul right to the marrow....
There we stood in the midst of a miracle.
We simply paused, stared out the window, and absorbed the awe of a moment no one could explain.
No explanations were needed.

Finally Made It To Blue

What's blue?
I love Annie's New Mexico sky photo. Has there ever been a bluer shade of blue?
I remember "Love Is Blue" from junior high mixers...oh boy, do I remember! I was the girl stuck to the wall -- praying somebody/anybody would ask me to dance while simultaneously scared to death somebody would.
And something old, new, borrowed, blue at my wedding -- well, that depends on which one we're talking about. Wedding #1, it was my bridesmaid's dresses. I still remember Carolyn and Kim and Debbie in those big floppy hats and their baby blue empire waist/Neru collared granny dresses with fistfuls of daisies...God, I miss the revolution!
Wedding #2 was a simpler event: backyard, justice of the peace, a few family members, our kids. What was blue?
Maybe it was my baby girl's beautiful eyes...so recently returned from almost certain death after a prolonged illness.
It could have been my heart...mourning the loss of my mother, not yet cold in her grave.
Blue was possibly the icing flowers on the cake that honored the start of our first year and the end of my husband's parents' 40th. Who could have known they'd have just three more?
Traditions are meaningful only when we make them so. I can't think that on the day of that second walk down the aisle they held much allure. I was beyond them. I had moved into practical survival mode and there was no room for frills. I had no pennies in my shoe or lace garter on my leg. I know we clinked champagne glasses but not long after that was done I was putting my new children to bed -- drying their tears as they wept for the lost home of their divorced parents.
That was thirty-something years ago and the beat goes on.
I read that psychics who claim the gift of the third eye, the ability to see auras, understand the blue emanations from a person indicate their deep rootedness in spirituality. People with blue auras tend to become social workers, teachers, writers, psychologists.
Or preachers?
I met an old Jewish lady named Gretchen several years ago. During the war her parents fled Germany with her in tow. Her father had been a famous artist there and the one thing he carried with him across the snowy mountains was a cask of cobalt. She explained that his signature etchings were done in the deepest of blue derived from this semi-precious element.
I spent an afternoon with her and when I readied myself to go she ran to her back room and returned with a cobalt blue pottery plate, formed by her own hands on the wheel that sat in the corner and fired in the kiln on her back porch.
It was flawed, she confessed. But she could not bear to throw it out. The blue in the clay was from the last of her father's precious stash.
An imperfect blue plate sits on my shelf and I love its story, its significance, its likeness to me, my days on the planet, my journey through time.

Some Thing Borrowed

It was the kind of world a kid knows isn’t normal but accepts because it’s all he or she has ever known. Yep. That was the world I was born into. And so when things got crazier than normal…(vs. normaler than crazy)…I just left.
Indeed I did.
At the ripe old age of 7, 8, 9, and beyond when other children were fast asleep, you would often find me climbing out the bedroom window and onto the wavy tin basement door to embark on a nocturnal scavenger hunt for hope.
Hope was the commodity I borrowed from those who lived in the houses up and down the streets I walked when I was very near the edge of that wonderful childhood condition called resilience.
Hope emanated from the warm yellow light that streamed from the windows of those homes. Peering in I borrowed the peace, the comfort, the safety, and the fraternity that those inside took for granted.
It was of no consequence whatsoever that most of those homes were filled with strife and anxiety, unrest and fear. The little girl standing on the sidewalk looking in could not have known this nor would she have wanted to.
The borrowing was what kept her life between the lines.

Some Thing New

New is the smell of fresh leather seats in a two door convertible bought off the showroom floor… odometer reading: .0001
New is the crisp resilience of a white cotton shirt still on the rack at Brooks Brothers, never worn and never washed.
New is the sparkle of a brilliant white diamond set in platinum and placed on the well-manicured finger of a June bride.
And new is the idea that these pricy stereotypes are farcical and illegitimate, far from genuine and less than real.
Thirty years into a marriage of inconvenience I think of those early days, the steamy moments, the new-ness of being in love.
And I realize that those feelings of excitement, immediacy, intensity, and heat…were, in a word, biology. Without them, I would not be here.
But somewhere between the then and the now – a more perfect union has come about and I know that new is a concept I had yet to know.
New is my husband every day, every day.
He is a man in motion, moving through his experience of life and becoming a human I could never have anticipated. This sexagenarian sharing my home is funny and cute and creative and cool. He is his own person and my person at once. And he is more of a person than he was at thirty-something.
He is in is element cooking meals, mopping floors, chopping wood, or wiping a grandchild’s tears…mounting a motorcycle, enduring a chick flick, or weeping at the grave of yet another departed friend.
His element is not dependant on the frivolities of life dreamed up by Hollywood or Madison Avenue or other untried amateurs.
His element is far more remarkable and interesting and this is truly new because I did not see it coming. No, not at all.
New is not worrying that my drooping jowls and sagging butt are a liability in my lover’s eyes.
New is understanding that love is not a flash in the pan tryst, but an investment of self whose returns are measured in memories, history, honesty, transparency.
New is in the eyes of the beholder and I behold a new beyond any new I could have created, left to my own devices.

On The Bible:

"It is a signpost and not a hitching post. It points beyond itself, saying, `Pay attention to God, not me.'"
William Sloane Coffin

Some Thing Old

For D
I read about her death.
An accident, they said.
But between the lines were hints
of the unmentioned empties they found in her closet, her cabinets, her trunk, her heart, and the note she left for nobody and everybody….
the silent scream.
She was the girl I wanted to be with the parents I wanted to own me.
She had the life I would have died for….
the one for which she died instead.
Old is the path I trod to her grave.
Old is the resolve of her mother who never gave up, never gives up the key that could have, would have freed her from the chains that bound her to the darkness and wed her to the demons who loved her scars and hated her possibilities.
Old is the voice of her father who finally abandons the code talk of his secret sins and asks for a second chance…. could I please have another chance?
Old is the belief that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, that all things work together for good for those who…blah, blah, blah.
Old is my criteria for measuring the quality of life.
Her children will have to wait to know the answer to the question they can’t stop asking: why?
Their coming of age will be a coming of truth.
And I wonder if the truth will set them free or set them up.

Tuesday's contribution to Lisa's Blog Carnival