“look it up,” my sweet momma would say. i blame her. for my word-curiosity. for my policing of spelling, punctuation, grammar. for my love of dictionaries and my commitment to learning. at 93 she was still asking questions, being curious, looking it up.
black and white composition books, of both thick and thin variety, populated my growing up, my teenage years, my college years, and ever since. though i do have a thready fondness of using My Girl’s and My Boy’s old unfinished spiral notebooks these days, we have piles of waiting-to-be-used composition books and they beckon when i open the supply cabinet in the sunlit office upstairs. places to jot poetry, thoughts, reflections, stories, lyrics, these composition books always make me think of my mom. they are places to process, to remember, to dream, to sort. they are the beginnings of stories, lyrics to ponder, the coda to the song. to someone else they are simply words on the page. to me, it is my breath that gives them life. we each have stories to tell, songs to write.
in the last few days i have had the frustration of feeling silenced. as i wrote in yesterday’s post, someone marked all five of my blogposts of last week on facebook as “spam” and that somehow triggered facebook to pull every last one of my blogposts – and any mention of my blogsite – down. every word – the simple ones, the ones that require looking-it-up – pulled down. with 650 posts, even averaging 500 words, that is 325,000 words. MY 325,000 words. gone.
in these times of chaos and unrest and pandemic, there are plenty of words out there. foul words, words of peaceful mantras, words of untruth, twisted words of conspiracy theories, imploring words, scientific words, words of wisdom from giants of wisdom, accessible words, words we have to look up, words we can hardly believe we’ve heard from various people-in-the-spotlight, words at which we roll our eyes, words we find reassuring.
in a daily email he receives, david shares a new word with me. “kawaii,” he reports, “means cute.”
the baby raccoons, most definitely kawaii, peeked out from behind the tree trunk. upon seeing us on the trail, they had scrambled from the little pond up the tree. they stared at us; we stared at them. they didn’t move, quizzically grasping onto bark and watching quietly. we didn’t move either. we just stood quietly on the trail and watched. the story they would tell about our encounter wouldn’t have many words. all was silent. all was motionless. they were safe; we were safe. for a few minutes, we shared the serene woods together, a little eye contact in hushed regard of each other. maybe, in their re-telling, in their speckled composition book, they would just tell the coda – “and then they left.”
every now and again i take out an old composition book. it’s astounding. i was so…..wordy.
read DAVID’S thoughts this NOT-SO-FLAWED WEDNESDAY
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i could picture columbus sitting on that porch, with the surrounding land to which his soul was ever-connected. i booked it, despite my mother-in-law’s wishes to stay at a motel in the area. now, it is dangerous to not listen and, even with my certainty about that being the right place for this pilgrimage, i was a little nervous about how they (read: she) would feel about it. they are dear to me and i don’t want to – well, let’s just say – tick them off.
the first time we sat on the porch columbus had a lite beer and stared out at the corn and soybeans (at least we think they were soybeans.). he talked about his days working in fields, traveling the roads he wondered if he could now remember, his friends, his growing-up house.
i could watch my husband listening to his dad, absorbing the details, sometimes patiently listening to repeated stories. i could watch my mother-in-law help with some of the details, talking about the history columbus had and their shared decades of life, some of it spent in this panther-highschool-football-team-land. i spent a good bit of time staring at the corn and soybeans too. and a good bit of time silently taking pictures of a sojourn that my father-in-law had talked about for years.
he wanted to go see and touch the home that his grandpa built, proud to have been raised in a house where he saw the toil that made it possible. he wanted to visit with his aunt joanne, a feisty woman just a couple years older than him. his list wasn’t long. not much else. he just wanted to BE there. and so we were. we followed his heart around his home town.
it was a little chilly that evening. early the next morning we would be taking them back to the airport. we didn’t sit on the porch.
reverse threading 