Wild Writing

October 18, 2024



A Few Things about My Mother. . . .

She said, as we discussed Daddy's funeral, that she had been preparing herself to be a widow for more than forty years or so, ever since Daddy was diagnosed with cancer of the bladder in 1976.



She knew how to live without him when he would spend his weeks away at job sites in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Mississippi, coming home for the weekend. She learned to be independent.



Mama taught me how to be selfless, putting the needs of others before her own, raising three children, and caring for her ailing father-in-law.



She taught me to love words by reading to me and then putting books in my hands, allowing me to order from TAB and Scholastic books, letting me escape into those other worlds.



She put music in front of me--those Thursday afternoon piano lessons with Elaine at first and then by myself.



She started working the last two years I was in high school to put us through college, something she believed she could not do herself. I wonder if she has regrets.



She taught me the meaning of "for better or worse, in sickness and in health. . . . til death do us part." Those four or five years when Daddy had cancer before the surgery that so drastically changed their married life, before the dpressions and the fear.



Mama is the matriarch, not just for me and my sister and brother, but for her grandchildren and for my cousin, helping her through some hard times and losses of her own.



Mama is an artist at the sewing maching. She had dabbled in paint and worked with wood. She learned the arts of knitting and crocheting as passed them on to me. She can make a meal out of left-over odds and ends.



She encouraged us to go where she couldn't. She encouraged us to think for ourselves even when our thinking and values differed from others. I describe her as a "conservative liberal." She doesn't hink in the mainstream. I think she was a feminist before there was such a thing! Yet, she is modest and taught us that same bold modesty.



Mama will be ninety next May. She still drives. She lives alone and maintains that 2,000 square foot ranch house on top of the hill surrounded by those forty or sixty acres of the homeplace. She says each year that she is not going to plant a garden, but she always sows a row of sugar peas and tomato and pepper seeds in those little peat pots in preparation for another growing season. The garden season is a part of her rhythm of life.

October 16, 2024



I want to lose myself in the moment. I want to become part and parcel of all that I see--or however Emerson said it about becoming a "transparent eyeball." I want to lose myself in the last greens of the summer and the emergings oranges and gold of the coming autumn--and the crisp air that makes my nose cold and runny.



I want to lose myself in words--my own and someone else's. I can go deep into the worlds others create. I am no longer me, but some other person in some other place and situation for a moment or more.



I want to lose myself in the softness of the new yarn I'm knitting into a blanet. I want to lose myself in the rhythm of knit one, slip slip knit, or knit this row and purl the next until it becomes automatic and soothing and my mind becomes blank and the swirling thoughts of plans and schemes fade into nothingness but peace and calm and the rhythm of knit one, two, three. . . .



I want to lose msyelf in the silence of the morning with the chirp of a solitary bird still lingering in the autumn morning. I want to lose myself in the golden light as I gaze out of the kitchen window at the broken cherry tree after last month's hurricane.



I want to lose myself with the heron and the egret as they wade through the weeds in the shallows of the pond, their concentration so focused they don't notice me stalking them to capture that one moment when their heads emerge from the murky water with a small sliver fish caught in their beaks.



I want to lose myself in music, instrumental or with lyrics, more words that transport me somewhere else in someone else's soul.



I just want to lose myself.

October 26, 2024



from "This is How They Come Back to Us" by Barbara Kingsolver



I think of Daddy when I go to my childhood home, him sitting in the recliner and turning on the TV,

telling stories that may or may not have some embellishment. After all, he came from a family of storytellers.



I think of him when I go to my old church, where he sat on the third pew from the front on the right-hand side, in front of the pastor's pulpit.

I can hear him singing those old, familiar hymns and smile when I remember how I knew if I was playing loud enough to support the singing: If I could hear Daddy singing, I wasn't playing loud enough. It became a kind of competition to see if that little Hammond spinet could draw out Daddy's baritone.



I think I Daddy when I drive by or walk through the fields I inherited from him, the hours he spent on his tractor plowing and sowing the seeds, cutting and raking the hay, baling it and loading it on the truck, and drinking ice water from a Mason jar (or a mayonnaise jar) wrapped in a brown paper bag on those hot days.



I think of him when he was recovering from the surgery, me riding the combine and tying the sacks of oats while he watched from the front seat of his old blue Ford pickup.

He would read recipes from the State newspaper or the co-op's Living magazine and give them to me to try.  We canned tomatoes in the "play house" that summer before I left home to live on my own seventy-five miles away.



I think of him when I stand on the remains of the garage floor he helped my husband pour and spread and smooth.



I remember his voice,

the thin, papery browned from years of working in the sun with the dark bruises.



I think of him when I see my sons and the lessons he taught them about hunting, the land, stewardship, love, and family.



I think of him on Veterans' Day and V-J Day and how narrowly he escaped being deployed to the Pacific during those last days of World War II.



I think of him when I'm with my brother and hear Daddy's wisdom coming from that brat who irritated me so much when we were children.



I think of him and know he has left a legacy.

Poem <n>I Wish I Wrote The Way I Thought</n> by author <n>Benedict Smith</n>.