Hello 25. Poppy and you shared the love of that ancient willow tree by the creek bed before you knew he loved it too. You still love it, but lightening takes it out soon. You don't know yet that you have hidden away in the wrinkles of your mind the warmth of cousins hanging over the bridge rail to watch brown cows with salt splash across their back. You haven't thought about or cared lately, of the spring that ran through the back yard. You never wondered where it originated, maybe from just the runoff from the embrace of the surrounding hills. After a rain, a small clear puddle collects in a ray of sunshine as it curls to the creek. Summers, butterflies congregated there, the same as now memories congregate and flutter, in the water and sun. Mama Franklin is so much in you, one day smocking a dress and the next splashing through that spring fed pool like a Viking warrior, chasing down and twisting a chicken's neck for chicken dinner.
You have been in love before but you are wandering at the moment. You will meet other loves. You will climb over your introverted walls that you love to build over and over again. You will uproot your nine yr. old to live on a college campus and he will absorb and teach as much or more to you than you do for him. He will define the man he is going to be, beginning the first day, when he climbs up onto the broken springs of a left behind rocker chair smelling of dirt and dog hair. He has every right to loud dissent for being taken from his known world for your personal goals. Instead, he stares out into the Cullowhee mountains and campus activity and says out loud to anyone, "I think I'm gonna like it here". You both thrive. You grow into loving the wits it takes to win the survival game. You don't break and lesson learned that being vulnerable is the foundation for winning. But that constant swim upstream will make it too easy to fall back into the very real comfort of a beautiful isolation, like a siren's song undertow. You will grow out of your black or white, right or wrong world and you will be grateful in the grey one with colorful acceptance and a love for the irreverent. My trash mouth and dry sense of humor would startle the 25 yr old you.
It remains a blurred line to this day how much of the wonder that you are and will be was predestined and how much of it was a choice. But I am thankful and grateful and love you.
to be continued....
You have been in love before but you are wandering at the moment. You will meet other loves. You will climb over your introverted walls that you love to build over and over again. You will uproot your nine yr. old to live on a college campus and he will absorb and teach as much or more to you than you do for him. He will define the man he is going to be, beginning the first day, when he climbs up onto the broken springs of a left behind rocker chair smelling of dirt and dog hair. He has every right to loud dissent for being taken from his known world for your personal goals. Instead, he stares out into the Cullowhee mountains and campus activity and says out loud to anyone, "I think I'm gonna like it here". You both thrive. You grow into loving the wits it takes to win the survival game. You don't break and lesson learned that being vulnerable is the foundation for winning. But that constant swim upstream will make it too easy to fall back into the very real comfort of a beautiful isolation, like a siren's song undertow. You will grow out of your black or white, right or wrong world and you will be grateful in the grey one with colorful acceptance and a love for the irreverent. My trash mouth and dry sense of humor would startle the 25 yr old you.
It remains a blurred line to this day how much of the wonder that you are and will be was predestined and how much of it was a choice. But I am thankful and grateful and love you.
to be continued....
1 comment:
Exquisitely beautiful, powerful and inspired. I am in love with this, with the lyricism and flow. I am going to read and re-read and savor. Thank you. So glad and grateful to see Pink Pedal Pushers.
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