Posts from the Road - Strength from the Earth

Another day of cold still air, planes frozen to the ground, waiting. Sitting, mass without sound, as the wind blows a navigation chart left on a low wing to the ground, a white dropping from a bird too cold to move. Icy water steals life from the sky, the frozen earth an altar to that which is gone.

Standing at the small frozen edge of water that edges the airfield, a King Fisher stands, looking for breakfast, finding only an icy hard table. His eyes can see in air and under water, but today his vista is barren. The pond completely frozen but for a small center, like an eye wide open to the insult of the cold. In its deep blue center, a small movement of stream, water ebbing and flowing, occasionally leaving the eyes center, out onto the ice like a tear. It waits and it waits. . seeing only upward, hoping for warmth before it's forced to close itself in resignation.

Winter is upon us, and too many years have passed since losing my Mom to cancer, but it came back later to my extended family, touching us, brushing us. I won't write of that, but there are things within us all that come out when we least expect them. We deal with it the best way we can, and we move on, quietly and with regrets for things lost. But for now, no thoughts of that. I have a cup of dark coffee that shakes the cold off of the hangar and soothes the chill that lingers only in my neck, the rest of me warmed by words that form from thoughts of the past.

Is there strength in memory? In one minute of memory there's my Mom's hands on the counter, making the Toll House cookies that I love to this day, hands steady and firm, belying the tremor inside of her, carefully measuring out the flour and sugar and salt, then just flinging in more chips than called for, wild abandon of sweetness in a life gone bland. In another, me waiting with her, as the strains of Beethoven fill the air in a kitchen fragrant with love. Letting the deep richness engulf me with a taste, hot from the oven, washed down by a glass of milk, cold as ice, meeting the warmth and expanding us both.

In spring, after the winter cold retreats, we walk the former shores of vast bodies of water looking for stones, stones that may have not been unearthed for years, abundant embedded in earth, untouched for centuries. They're quiet treasures within the soils that once were ocean shores, earth riddled with unclaimed treasures that people simply pass and forget, not knowing what they have underneath their feet.

Some are so tiny as to be little bearings of smoothness, the size of a small birds egg. Others take both hands to hold. My Mom is fascinated by stones, and we search through the grey and dark and cold surfaces looking for the one that will break open into glorious color of gemstone. Rich colors forged in heat and fire and fate. She hunts down an agate, and knowing what she will find inside of it, she smiles.

Agates were found on the shores of the Northwest and in the fields of Montana and in native culture were believed to cure the stings of scorpions and the bites of snakes, soothe the mind, prevent contagion, still thunder and lightning, promote eloquence, secure the favor of the powerful, and bring victory over enemies. In this agate, she might not find a cure for the stinging bite of what she has within her, but in it she finds strength and beauty, swirling colors of joy in that moment, something to sooth the thunder that rolls through her in dark frightened moments. She hand picks them, and catalogs them by type and color and origin. I happily work with her, capturing the energy of the earth. Harnessing the strength that keep her alive.

Outside the frosted window this morning, a hawk, stalking the small King Fisher, come to find sustenance, cunning and vigilant, feathered fate waiting and watching. Always wanting something more. He sits, quiet, like stone, unmoving and waiting for what he desires. Determined in his longing for life held close, no different than you or I.

Last night after a very long day, I wrote a letter to my niece, way out West in another city. The writing paper is held under a weight of dense agate, the colors of blue and white and black, as surreal as the sky under which the hawk flies, as blue and clear as my mother's eyes. My niece never knew her grandmother really, only through photos held and scattered around the shores of our home, waiting to be picked up and found.

She asked me to tell her of her Grandmother. All I can think of is my Dad after she was gone, moving across their bedroom floor in bare, cold feet, the room now nearly empty, but thunderous with her presence. Her clothes still in her closet, the remnants of her existence in colorful pieces of cloth, in those favorite colors of agates, blues, and black obsidian and ivory, blues and golds, discovered like gemstone when the closet was broken open. And the look on his face as he found them. Not a look of grief, or incomprehension, but a look of fierce affirmation that she had been here, that she had loved him. A look of recognition, of the subtle, complex beauty that she left us - her spouse, her children.

The hawk takes to the sky with a keen of loss, joining the radiant aggregate of blue, the prey he desired long gone. I look around me where I wait, seeing what is here, what is gone. I had tried to write the words. And I couldn't, words frozen in my throat, a tear trickling out of my eye, splashing on stone, as azure swirls of cold clear blue let loose the waters of memory.