Portrait in Linen

Had Stevie Nick’s Stand Back on repeat for three days now.  (That’s how it is with music these days.  Azure Ray when I’m feeling sorry for myself, Don Henley when I’m feeling needy, U2 when I’m feeling like standing at the top of a tower and wailing into the atmosphere….)  But…it’s Stevie.  Three days, count ‘em.

House is turned upside down, but kids don’t notice a thing, except sleeping arrangements are wacky.  Explanation:  “No one sleeps in their own bed around here.”  True (and grammatically incorrect), but not what I meant.  But they don’t know that.

House hums along as if nothing were amiss.  Home schooling gets done.  Housework gets done.  Dinner gets done.  Everything done except this awful mess, which has no connection to the words “foreseeable future.”

I might be accused of pessimism.  Not true, not true.  Quite the opposite.  I have faith until it’s six feet under rain-packed dirt.  And I’m patient.  And stubborn.

But I won’t do it alone.  One shoulder only.  It’s a strong shoulder.  It serves a multitude of purposes.  Good for tears, good for sharing weight distribution, cold when needed.  But the offer includes only one–no more, no less.

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And I find I’m totally, utterly turned off by the color red.  Thought I might completely trash anything I have in that particular color.

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And a new metaphor comes to mind…a strange rock formation in the desert.  What gives it a particular shape, with a gaping hole through the center, smoothed and parted feet along the bottom, a sloped head?  Wind, rain, rivers, storms….  Seems to keep its balanced stance, no matter how precarious.  May lean to an absurd angle, bend on a wild arc of contortion.  Can’t apologize for what’s missing, for the lack of symmetry.  More and more, it becomes.  Becoming.

Maybe, through the millennia, the torrents of time and surface fits will trace and graze stone under stone, until one day, the earth exhales a lazy whisper-breath that carries away the last grain of sand.  By then, there will be no one left who remembers shape or shadow.