Pencil Lines

In an age of computers, some objects are quickly acquiring a nostalgic quality. During some spring cleaning , I came across several boxes of new pencils. Leftover from my son's elementary and middle school days. I kept a few, and added the rest to a box I fill every spring cleaning and I donate along with clothes to charity. The pencils tugged at my heart. I draw my designs for my embroideries in pencil still before I start on the stitchery. Pencil lines are soft, and can be modified with gentle erasing. When I was a teenager, I wrote my first poems in pencil in a small pink notebook. I found it interesting that I made a great effort not to have to resort to the use of an eraser. Each word seemed a friend I owed some respect. I loved drawing in pencil, especially flowers and butterflies. I still do. And I became fond of pencils with designs on them, and so was my son when he was a child. I kept one of his Tigger pencils, and use it to this day. Pencil lines are modest, and yet very visible. The thing that always both fascinated and bothered me was that they are so easily removed, or erased. It made me think of people. It seems they can be like pencils marks, there one minute, gone the next. The weather was beautiful over the weekend, sunny, bright, warm, all the birds singing under a blue sky, and it made me feel visible, useful, energized, happy. The last few days, as is promised for the next week, it has been raining, and the skies and just about everything under it, has turned grey and cold. It made me think of darker pencil lines. It also made me feel like someone up there was going around with a big eraser that turned everything invisible, including me. It was a discouraging feeling. But, I figured it would be a temporary one, much like the pencil lines themselves. And with some effort, I would be able to add some pencil lines myself, and draw in a sun and bird or two into that bleak looking sky right now. Friendships can be like pencil lines, it seemed to me. They add depth and richness to our own lines, and when we lose a friend, it seems part of the drawing that is our life, goes missing. It is the same with family we have lost for whatever reason. Part of the lines that defined our picture, are missing. Some days it is easy to add new lines and fill in the painful gaps, and other days, the effort seems futile, and all we end up with is a broken eraser, a busted pencil tip, and on really bad days, a hole in the drawing paper. I remember putting tape over homework where I had rubbed a hole in the paper. My teachers never said anything, but they sure were not impressed either. I thought it was rather a practical solution. The holes always made me feel a bit whimsical in my embarrassment, it was a bit of rebellion against tedium, and over time I became fond of little holes. In paper, especially, they are such a humble reminder not to take ourselves and our efforts too seriously. A chirping bird outside my window just now added another pencil line, one that made me smile. Rain and grey skies or not, spring was here to stay. I better sharpen those pencils, and add in some more birds, and a sweet Blue Cabbage Moth or two.

The Toy Motorcycle

My husband and I spent the weekend cleaning up the backyard, clearing the many dead branches and some entire bushes after the brief but very cold winter. Our fruit bushes were hardest hit. We will get some new blueberry bushes, our strawberries did fine, because they were growing in the greenhouse. It was very satisfying to go through the entire 1\4 acre and have a very good idea of what condition our trees and bushes were in. I turned my attention to the inside of the house. I had finished cleaning and dusting our son's room and was finishing our bedroom. It was down to a set of shelves that held a lot of sentimental items, like pictures and little objects that held memories going back almost 25 years. I came across a small toy Harley Davidson motorcycle, that was a favorite of my son when he was a toddler. It made me think of my husband's Yamaha Virago now parked in the garage. He parked it there after our son was born in1992. We used to go around on that motorcycle all over Austin, Texas, where we met and where we both were getting our master's degree. Our very first date, March 9th, 1985, we went out on that motorcycle. It was so much fun. My husband changed his life a lot for me when we got married. He was a bachelor at 35, and deciding to get married, and start a family, and give up his motorcycle when our son was born, was quite a change. We have been married 28 years this summer, and he has been a very steadfast husband and father. People often think of courage as in very brave, attention getting events, and they are certainly part of what courage is all about. But there is a different kind of courage that people display every day. Husbands, wives, fathers , mothers who devote their lives daily to their families, day after day, whether they always feel like it or not. In that sense , my husband is a brave man, as is every loving husband and father out there, and as is every loving wife and mother out there. Seeing the toy motorcycle was a touching reminder that my husband chose to be a devoted family man, devoted to our son and me. All around this town are brave people who probably do not consider themselves so, but to believe in your family each and every day, as a father, a mother, whether you are single mom or dad, or married, is challenging and takes a lot of strength and determination. And a lot of courage.   

The Stretcher

It was a windy, blustery day and my son and I were headed out the door for a brisk walk with our feisty Flemish Bouvier- Labrador, Yara, before the wind turned to a steady, cold rain. I had noticed a large firetruck across our street about 2 hours earlier, and wondered what it was doing there. Now I had my answer. There was a quiet house across the street three houses over, where a woman who looked to be in her early to mid seventies lived alone with her little Pekingese dog. As I watched a man wheel a stretcher out with a body on it,completely covered up, I realized the woman had died just now. Must have been a massive heart attack or maybe a brain aneurysm. My son and I looked at each other somewhat numb. Our dog is very aggressive around strangers, so we decided to take our walk to the left rather than walk by the deceased woman's house where the ambulance and coroner were. As we started walking and the fresh breezy wind hit our face, we shook the silence between us, and tried to enjoy our walk. When we returned, our cheeks red form the cold wind, all the cars were gone from the dead lady's house, and the emptiness and sadness of what had happened to her hit me. I was surprised by the intensity of the sadness that engulfed me. I did not know her name. I just knew from a neighbour that she had lost her husband a few years back. The only relative I ever saw once in a blue moon at her house was what looked like a daughter. It seemed to be mostly her and her little dog. She drove this little brown sedan that now sat lonely in the driveway. Her house looked suddenly sad with its previously cheerful little flowerbeds and clean curtains and lawn decorations. I knew nothing about her, whether she had been a kind or a mean person, whether she had been happy or sad. Whether she had enjoyed a happy marriage or a strenuous one, whether she had a daughter who cared about her. I had only said "Hi" to her a few times as we walked our dog, and she was busy tending to the flowers in her yard. Yet, I felt an acute sense of loss. She had lived for years in our street, and now she was dead. She yelled at me once for walking what she considered too close to her mailbox. I answered her : " I don't want your mailbox, I have one of my own!" She didn't say anything further and that was the only exchange I ever had with her, other than the occasional "Hi!" or "Hello!". Today was the first day of spring, it was cold, but very sunny with a clear blue sky, filled with cheerfully puffy white clouds, the kind that made me wonder as a child if clouds like that were made of whipped cream. Death is so sanitized in our modern world. My husband is a therapist and is scared to talk about it or even think about it. I have dealt with a lot of death in the last 15 years, and to me it is a sort of mind companion, one I got used to, after the death of both my younger sisters and both my parents under terrible circumstances. I think death deserves respect, acknowledgement and I think I would feel better about the anonymous woman's death just yesterday, if her front door were draped in the beautiful purple and black cloth they used to decorate the doors of houses with where people had died and that I remembered seeing as a child in Belgium. If a beautiful tall lantern was burning twenty-four seven until the day of the funeral, and I saw people coming and going to the house where she was laid up in her bedroom, in beautiful drapes, as people came to view her, and on the third day, a hearse would pick up her body that had been by now embalmed and put in the casket, and the family and friends would leave from her house to the funeral service, where if it was an open casket service all her family and friends would say goodbye to her before the final drive to the cemetery  and the final good-bye and interment. When I was growing up, and you passed by a house that was draped in the purples and black of bereavement, you slowed down and said a prayer for the soul that had departed. People who lost someone to death wore a black armband for some time, so you would know this person had lost someone close to them. Death was acknowledged, and you wore black or grey for some time after the funeral as a family member of the deceased person. I agree that that practice of being in mourning was taken too far in the past where it became impossible for a widow to remarry, but I think in its milder form as I described, the practice of admitting and recognizing death was a good one. I shudder at the indifference today. Death was in our street and no one even knew an hour or two later. That indifference is fundamentally wrong. If it wasn't, I would not feel the revolt and nausea I do now at the death of a stranger.

The Realization

It was incredibly quiet,nothing unusual in our street, but the eerie silence of the last years still was creepy at times, even on an unusually warm, sunny day, with birds singing and a blue sky. I inhaled the fresh air, and smiled. I was cleaning up some of the lingering winter dust in the living room. Looking at a picture of my deceased parents, and baby pictures of Nicholas, I wondered about the mystery of time passing by, like water down a river. I looked around my small, modest ,but very cozy house that had all the charm of a neatly overstuffed curio shop. I was emptying the dishwasher, and smiled at my very modest and limited dishware, recalling my mother's silver chest with Christoffle silver, and her 19th century crystal goblets, and two full complete sets of Limoges fine china. I suddenly realized something. I had not been born to be happy. I was born to endure, to be strong, to bear witness. My family was destroyed by intrigue, betrayal, illness, alcoholism, death. I was the only one left, other than my brother whom I had not seen in 16 years now. But after some therapy 4 years ago, I finally had started writing again, poems, and travel memories, and childhood recollections, and it felt good, freeing. I had started my embroideries, had continued and intensified my care for abandoned and unwanted dogs and cats and devoted myself to my husband and son, trying to shake the dysfunctional demons of both our families. The realization that I was strong, had endured, and had made the best of the rubble handed me, made me smile broadly.  It was certain that I had taken quite a tumble down the social ladder, that I was invisible and anonymous, that I was isolated socially and intellectually, and artistically, that I was not able to travel freely like I was in college and graduate school, but the realization that I was strong, that I was writing anyway, no matter how much of it felt like I was writing on the sky and clouds, somehow made me calm, relaxed even, and no less determined. To understand it was my destiny to just share, write, and love, no matter how hard or challenging the circumstances, somehow made my burdens feel lighter. I was not free in my circumstances, due to a mixture of certain emotional scars, but, that heavy chain felt less chafing today. The world is full of millions and millions of people who are not free in one way or many others, and yet , many of them survive, thrive and even smile in the face of great and constant adversity. Are they happy? I am sure many of them would answer happiness is a luxury they cannot even contemplate, but, they take pride in strength, endurance, courage, acceptance, kindness. I believe it was the great Bengal poet Rabindranath Tagore, one of my all time favorite writers, who said : " God must have loved the humble people, because He made so many of them. " Compared to the way I was raised, I lived very humbly, so much so that my mother did not want relatives and friends from Belgium, my country of birth, to come visit me and my husband and son. She was ashamed of me. Your loss, mother, because I am strong, and courageous and kind. And I think there are very few people who want to have written on their tombstone; " I was rich, and important, but a lousy human being". Today was important to me, because I realized my soul, my heart, are mine, and they are facing every day with hope, optimism and a relentless conviction in rebirth, like the phoenix rising from the ashes, refreshed, renewed. And maybe, just maybe, the seeds of happiness are sown when we accept, with a heart bursting with the longing to make a difference, the complete, amazing mystery that is life.  

Couleur de Sang

Le ciel soupire gris
au dessus la chanson muette
des gens et traffique autour de moi.

Tu me manques, ta rassurance de loin
calme et respectueuse.
Ou es-tu, je me demande.

La peine cause par ton silence
coule rouge comme une blessure
une riviere dans la foret de ma solitude.

Couleur de sang, si beau et brilliant
parmi la grissitude du monde autour
de mes espoirs et reves courageux.

Couleur de sang, chaud et lent,
comme la caresse manque d'un amant
feu rouge de mon ame cherchante.

Couleur de sang, couleur qui dechire
le gris hypnotique du jour qui pleure
comme une enfant qui est perdue.

Couleur de sang, un collier de perles rouges
un S.O.S dans la neige aveugle du temps
ma blessure peint ton nom sur les etoiles.


Trudi Ralston.
March 5th, 2014.
pour un ami a l'autre bout du monde.
pour D. O.